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Gémino H. Abad Quotes
b. 1939
Gémino Henson Abad (born February 5, 1939) is a Filipino poet, essayist, literary critic, and educator from Cebu, Philippines. Widely regarded as one of the foremost voices in Philippine literature in English, he has shaped the country’s literary landscape through his poetry, critical essays, and anthologies.
Random Gémino H. Abad quote
33 quotes
“Concepts without intuition are empty, says Immanuel Kant; intuitions without concept are blind.”
“The real is the poem. Hence, for the poet—our figure for the writer as artist—to write is to get real.”
“Ubuntu, says Nelson Mandela – freely translated: ‘I am because we are.’”
“The liar abuses language for the word by itself speaks true.”
“What is most real is what is most imagined.”
“The poet forges his own path through the wilderness of language—where the words contend for their own image and meaning—for his own clearing in that wilderness.”
“There, in the poetry as wrought, if one reads close and imagines well, the poet, and the scholar also, may well be his own country’s best critic and interpreter.”
'Language, a conceptual, evocative system of representation, is our only means to translate into an apprehensible verbal form our thoughts and feelings about our world in our own time and culture.”
"Our words are concepts, abstractions.”
“I think of Philippine literature as an archipelago of letters because we have many languages, including English and Spanish, both of which have been assimilated over time into our various regional languages.”
“Greek poiein, ‘to make,’ yields the English word ‘poem’; hence, poem is a generic term for all kinds of literary work, poetry for imaginative literature, and the poet, a figure for all writers as literary artists.”
“Tagalog, Sugbuanon, Hiligaynon, Warai, Iloco, Bicol, etc.—they are as much Filipino as that evolving Tagalog-based Filipino that we hope would eventually, through great writing from it, become truly our national language.”
“In the poet’s entire corpus, his poems constellate and converse with one another, and therefore, the reader or critic is able to comprehend the poet’s central themes or main concerns and grasp his unique place in his own country’s literary tradition.”
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