Thomas In A Minor Key

by Ophelia A. Dimalanta, Michael M. Coroza (Translator)

"The play is about a poet writing a play about Thomas Aquinas. The similarity with the situation of Ophie herself being commissioned to write a play is deliberate and clever. The poet in the play finds himself in situations that, even more cleverly, parallel those that Aquinas encountered in life. The multiple layers of metaphor are something only a true poet, namely, Ophie, could have created. At the end of the play, the poet finds that what he has created in his mind does not get on paper and not on stage, but changes his life dramatically (excuse the pun). That Ophie’s death is predicted in the play is one of the ironies of creative writing: life inevitably follows art.

In English, the play is as lyrical as one can get. In the Filipino translation by Michael M. Coroza, that lyricism is kept. In fact, in the Filipino version, the sense of living in the imagination rather than in real life becomes even more obvious, probably because the play in Filipino is automatically read in the context of ordinary playwriting... Coroza is able to capture Ophie’s original intention within a context unknown to readers in English."

93 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta was a Filipino poet, editor, author, and academician. Dimalanta published several books of poetry, criticism, drama, and prose and edited various literary anthologies. In 1999, she received Southeast Asia’s highest literary honor, the S.E.A. Write Award.