Doros asin mga anghel : translations in Bikol of John Donne's holy sonnets and selected works / Victor Dennis T. Nierva.

The true test of the use of language is how writers enable it to bear the burdens and obligations of meaning across time, geography, and states of being. John Donne and his contemporary William Shakespeare made English do just that and we are ourselves proof as we delight and are instructed in their works. And Donne's specially, as his poems continue to awake in us awe of the divine, a reverence that throbs not just from our souls but through our flesh. For Donne's poetry is at the same time sensual and mystical, a tremulous encounter along cosmic edges where the sacred may not be shamed by the profane, and the profane trembles as it becomes, yes, sacred. It is the same challenge for the newly awakened Bikol consciousness, urged by the newly aching-to-be-alive Bikol writing (which it visibly is), that Vic Nierva in his translation of Donne puts upon himself. His burden is Bikol's burden, and his triumph that of the language itself. But his labor is his own, his subject as well as his desire takes him along Donne's cosmic edges. And thus his love is at once its own fruit. It will be both a little terrifying and ecstasy-inducing to witness how, indeed, like Donne's divine poetry, Nierva can, and will, in this translation project, annunciate how the Bikol Word has been made flesh. -Marne L. Kilates