Seven Mountains of the Imagination transposes for the first time into the mouth, as it were, of our borrowed tongue National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario’s prose. But it is no ordinary prose. It is a prose about poetics. Here is language trying to speak itself. Here is language trying to speak to itself of its own universe of experience, narrative, symbol, metaphor, textures, surfaces, interiors – its seven mountains of imagining and knowing itself – but using only its own maps and resources, its own words. This is the Filipino language prescribing to itself critical, literary, and even ethical values, but only in Filipino. But it is only in the necessary betrayal of translation – in being intimate with the language’s synapses, so to speak – that the discoveries of this internal journey are revealed to those who don’t speak it.
