Insurrecto

by Gina Apostol

Inversions provide a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, do not require logical coherence. This is the case of the Bahasa-Indonesian prayer in Peter Weir’s movie. The Indonesian prays the “Our Father” in Tagalog, not Bahasa—that is, he need not be coherent. It’s the concept that counts. Inversions are opposed to obversions, that is, providing a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, are generally insulting. The Ewok dialogue in the Star Wars prequel, a few choice Tagalog epigrams, is a basic Filipino fuck-you to the universe. Diversions, like the irate Filipino farm workers in Stockton, California, in Anderson’s The Master, are plausible, though irrelevant in the overall scheme of things. What Magsalin expects is that Chiara’s script will require reversions: a set of matching signifiers that, if reversed, will portray the privileged language as in fact the other, and vice versa. Perversions, of course, produce scant good. Lastly, conversions, in which one exists like a vestigial body, a desiring corpus, occupied by the words of others, is the most difficult of these types of translations: Magsalin simply refuses to attempt them.