From the back cover:
“May isang halik
na buong buhay tayong sinasabik.”
– Jelaluddin Rumi
"Nabighani: Mga Saling Tula ng Kapwa Nilikha" is a collection of creative Tagalog translation of ‘spiritual’ poems of known and slightly known authors, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jelaluddin Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, John O’Donohue, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, Kahlil Gibran, Julian of Norwhich, Francis of Assisi, Francis Xavier, Ignatius of Loyola, Charles de Foucauld, Chuang Tzu, Thich Nhat Hanh, John Paul II, and even Pope Francis, together with other poems originally written in Cebuano, Chabacano and Obo Manobo. It also features segments of theological prose by Dean Brackley, Egide Van Broekhoven, Leonardo Boff, Dorothy Day and Teresa of Calcutta, as well as Jesuit congregational documents surprisingly rendered literary through the craftsmanship of Albert E. Alejo, SJ, who as “Paring Bert” embodies in his mission a not-so-easy combination of being a poet-anthropologist and a priest-activist. His self-interview at the end of the book, “Ang Magpari ay Magsalin,” is itself a poetic theory of the spirituality of priesthood as translation. As one critic says, the research and scholarship that glows in this volume flows from a “sustained discipline and devotion to the art and craft of ferrying across not only the meaning/fulness of the poems from source language to target language, but also their metaphors and mellifluousness.” These pieces, therefore, are “significant not only as translations, but also as literary works in their own right.”