Thursday, July 17, 2008

LRT Poetry (whoa! it even rhymes!)

If you use the LRT 1 and 2 (or maybe even the MRT--I'm not sure) you might have encountered the ads posted as a promotion by the Instituto Cervantes translating into Filipino, Spanish poems written by such giants as Pablo Neruda side by side with the orignal Spanish verse. Most of the poems I read were boring, but I must say, I was enamored by Luis Cernuda's "Si el hombre pudiera decir lo que ama".

The verse reads:
Tú justificas mi existencia:
si no te conozco, no he vivido;
si muero sin conocerte, no muero, porque no he vivido.
Which they translated as:
Ikaw and dahilan kung bakit ako nandito:
Kung di kita nakilala, di sana ako nabuhay;
Kung ako'y mamamatay nang di kita nakilala,
Hindi ako mamamatay, dahil hindi ako nabuhay.
Translated in English by Spanish to English (in case you don't understand Spanish or Filipino) as:
You justify my existence:
if I do not meet you, I haven't lived;
if I die without meeting you, I don't die, because I haven't lived.
(You'd have to trust me when I say that the Filipino version is much more romantic and melodious than the lousy English version. Click here to read the whole thing.)

Isn't this a romantic thing to say to someone? I don't die because I never lived. I'd love to be one who would make someone live their life so fully that they forget they're alive without me. With that said I must say that I think this rather cheesy and a tad bit extreme. I can imagine ladies rolling their eyes to heaven if I said anything as queso-crap as that. Yeah yeah, so I'm incapable of saying something romantic.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nope, MRT doesn't carry those ads.

philos said...

@arbet: Thanks hehe... not that you'd be able to read anything in the MRT when there's half a million people between you and the ad.

Anonymous said...

it's really hard for men to be cheesy and all... but a little sweet effort goes a long long way... though it's not so easy to be romantic and all... hahaha

philos said...

@piapot: Haha... It's actually easy for men to be cheesy, hard to be romantic hehe... I say cheesy stuff all the time, not that I'm a romantic person :p

Rian Gabor said...

hehe... all i can say is: I WANNA LEARN how to speak spanish!!!...

philos said...

@Rian: Go! Learn! They're offering classes... or if you want to try something else, talk to ICSEC-Kaplan, they have Berlitz Spanish if I'm not mistaken.