2. I cannot write their bodies, despite the compact spell of English. I insist on the syntax of our singularities to remind me of positional checkpoints.
To remind me and other bodies of inhibition. Or else meaning reproduces. Meanings that murder me to be necromanced as Walter Benjamin defines the
task of the translator. Meanings I will have no authorship of. Let them be me, then. The author, the murderer, and the necromancer. If betrayal is inevitable,
I will be the one to betray myself.

3. By now, my translation method should be evident. Like other criminal metaphors, I am a hijacker. But I am a hijacker at the gunpoint of another and
I am trying to distract him. Language is fundamentally a tool for persuasion and influence, and at times for deception; as lie is speech which hides our
authentic thought, said Jose Ortega Y Gasset.

4. I privilege what the kitchen likes instead of what it’s like because translation is violent and I cannot look away from bodies being butchered.
Venuti explains this in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, of forcible replacements of differences and intelligibility entitled to the target language
reader, but here, it is retribution against the witness. I cannot sit in my oblivion and keep the safety of the shelter of the noun room. As a translator, I am too
aware of what is inside, the active operation of the verb containing.

5. I understand desire has long articulated itself a few lines ago but I still cannot seem to let it go. After dinner, after semantic equivalence, it is never too
late for this word to come.

6. With John Ciardi, I admit a translator’s explanation is an apology for failure. I translate my own struggle in finding an equivalent that does not presume filling,
that does not reach outward. So I must name only the cavity present, with no promise of satisfaction. Heed the structure instead: the high, beautiful ceilings.
Remember, I am trying to distract him. For that, poetry disappears in translation.

7. I decline dessert. The word morphemically harbors its own withdrawal: himagas, from pagas, to diminish. Ebb to retain the motion of lessening. As the original
saturates, I must translate toward recession. The vehicle of language grows unstable; something threatens to exceed my custody.

8. Negotiation promises that “everybody” leaves with something, Umberto Eco warns me. Something surrendered for something to pass. The binary magkabilang still
implicates too many bodies at once, it names relation without assigning possession, and possession is what English demands. Whose is the shame (see: footnote 9) that
follows? Poetry is getting to me, its resistance to description unsettles certainty. Thus, I implicate all. No one owns shame entirely, no one escapes it.

9. I have to redirect appetite again (see: footnote 5), I must. Translation demands intimacy before intervention, and in the preceding processes, I have touched the gut
closely enough to replace it. I yield sikmura, the body’s interior insistence, to shame, its interpretation. That way, the source is not searched. Look here, I have gutted it
to presentation already.

10. Corazon D. Villareal notes the Filipino propensity for anatomical thinking in linguistic expressions; the body structures meaning itself, the body, its semiotic
structure. The translator must choose which part survives. I intended to thin most of its corporeality to accommodate English’s metaphorical economy, which cannot
afford Tagalog’s wider, bodily semantic field. The skin was the safest to retain, the most translatable boundary.

11. Following Derrida’s notion of an accord of tongues, replication would presume a totality translation cannot sustain. How could I ever conclude with fullness,
at this point? Has one mouth ever completed what the other mouth begins? And whose are these mouths? It has come to me, in my translation process, that completion
is not the aim. Excess remains immured in the nocturnal core of the source text. I cannot help it, the pure language emerging between the two, here, here.