What does it mean to translate from the archive, especially when it is temporally and linguistically removed from the present? In the golden age of Philippine Binisayâ poetry from the 1900s to the 1940s, the virtuosic poet, critic, and priest Fernando A Buyser cemented his place in the canon of Philippine literature for both his nationalistic, romantic poems and his curating of indigenous oral poetry. In this intimate essay, Editor-at-Large Alton Melvar M Dapanas considers the sociohistorical, linguistic, and personal complexities of excavating the archive for the works of Buyser and rendering his poetry into English. Dapanas meditates over Buyser’s legacy in Philippine literature, as well as the joyous yet fraught process of unearthing texts from the antiquity.
The stories that comprise us have left us both wanting more, wishing we had access to a fuller narrative frame. I call this wishing-wanting desire “the ghost archive.” Everything we need to know but cannot know as we keep circling and sniffing around the edges. Everything that keeps affecting us and affecting others through us. Everything that remains right there, but just out of reach.
—Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You
Scouring through the Stanford University Libraries’ press archives of early twentieth-century Philippines in the midst of the Delta variant surge brought me to Fernando Buyser y Aquino and the years between 1905 and 1937. I suppose, based on these archives, that Bishop Fernando A. Buyser was a typical Filipino priest: he officiated baptisms, headed processions during important religious holidays, performed administrative functions at the council of bishops, held committee membership for fundraisers, went to a lawyer for the church’s legal documents to be notarised, among other duties. Of the Aglipayan Church or the Philippine Independent Catholic Church, later renamed as Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI)—a religion that half of my family still practice to this day and the same church that baptised me (though I no longer identify as Christian)—Bishop Buyser preached to areas outside his diocese. In a 1934 gacetilla, or newsletter, published in the bilingual La revolucion [The Revolution], he held what seemed like religious missions to Iloilo and Negros Oriental and Occidental provinces, and the neighbouring Antique, Romblon, and Capiz, his diocese comprising Cebu, Bohol, Samar, and Leyte. In his early pre-bishop years as an ordained priest, he wasn’t spared from criticism. Drawing flak, a satirical piece and an editorial were published, calling him out in separate issues of the Catholic-owned periodical Ang camatuoran [The Truth]. What caused this, apparently, was Buyser’s Lutherian critique against the ways of the Roman Catholic clergy. Given the 1902 schism of the IFI from Rome, tensions were bound to arise.
All these seem typical given his stature and the times, and in many ways, at least based on the archives, he may have been. Except that he was also a poet and wrote short stories, plays, novelettes, pre-modern forms of ars poetica on both theoria and praxis, as well as literary and cultural criticism. In another periodical, Ang suga [The Light], a writer working under a penname, most likely a contemporary, would dedicate a poem to Buyser. A Philippine Magazine article, concerning a survey of ancient allegorical fables, published May 1936, cited him for expert opinion. Both are evidence that his peers looked up to him, offering a glimpse of the happenings inside the literary circles back in the day. In these same papers, he was congratulated for his prolific output, notably his works titled Ang Ulay sa mga Kasakit [The Virgin of Sorrows] and Ang Arka sa Kaluwasan [The Arc of Salvation]. (It was in his collection Ang Rueda ug ang Oraculo [The Wheel and the Oracle] where Buyser advertised his PO box, the very address of the IFI cathedral which still stands today in Mabini street of Cebu.) The last mention of him in the same archive was in 1937 from La revolucion, about his pre-retirement designation down south as parish priest of Mainit, Surigaw, now Surigao del Norte, in Mindanao where he died a few years later. A government-run school in Mainit’s adjacent municipality, Tubod, named after him (F. Buyser Elementary School) was built in 1961 and still runs today.
Craft-wise, what positioned him further in the canon is his anthologising and curating of oral poetry indigenous to the Cebuano Binisayâ-speaking Filipinos in the two volumes of Mga Awit sa Kabukiran [Mountain Songs], first published by Liberty Press in 1911 and republished as a second edition in 1924. Dedicated to his “yutang-natawohan” (Motherland), Mountain Songs collated various poetic forms such as balitaw (a song and dance love debate between a man and a woman), harito (shaman’s prayers), kulilisi (improvised recited verse, sometimes spelled as kolilisi), awit and saluma (poetic songs), garay (informal poetry), and balak (formal poetry). The act of collating oral Binisayâ poetic forms, something rarely done at the time (unless you’re a white anthropologist-missionary who married a Filipino woman), was a “pioneering work [that] proved to be the best grounding in the poetic tradition in the Visayas,” in the words of poet and translator Marjorie Evasco. Even American ethnologist Donn V. Hart tried to locate Buyser’s collection of 360 riddles, Usa Ka Gabiing Pilipinhon [A Filipino Night], for his critical study on folktales although to no avail.
In rendering or “ferrying” Buyser’s poetry from Binisayâ, our shared native tongue, into the English, I considered the important element that Buyser and I come from a strongly oral storytelling culture. I also kept in mind the core teachings of the IFI, the nationalist, separatist church, which was consequentially formed as a type of resistance against colonisation, summarised in the very church’s coat of arms: Pro Deo et Patria (for God and Country). Buyser himself was a veteran of both wars of the Philippines against the Spanish Empire (1896-98 Philippine Revolution) and the United States (1899-1902 Philippine-American War). Without question, he embodied Yutang Pinangga, the Binisayâ version of the Philippine national anthem sung after the opening hymns of every IFI liturgical mass of my childhood: “Yuta nga putli, duyan ka nga hamili. / Sa panggubatan, way gikahadlokan / . . . Among isaad nga kun daw dagmalon ka, / Sa kamatayon andam kami” [Land of the pure, cradle of the noble / In the battlefront, we fear no one / . . . We vow that if you will be invaded, / In the face of death, we are ready] (translation mine).
Buyser’s religious and revolutionary, as well as his sociopolitical milieu, thematically explain the “Spanish-influenced religio-romantic impulses” in his works, symptomatic of pre-Second World War poetry in Binisayâ, comparable to the rhetoric of “classical speech: highly elevated, formal, romantic, tending toward the sentimental and the mystical.” Often, Binisayâ poetry during this time was characterised with “end rhymes and the assonantal rhymes [where] one can hear . . . the alliterative sounds g, t, n, k, d, and p which give the poem its musical muscle” and conventionally, “the ‘poetic’ is equated with mellifluity of sound and felicitous turns of phrases.” But Buyser was also an æsthetic rebel, at least by the standards of his time, as he appropriated the Anglo-Italian sonnet into the Binisayâ sonanoy (from “sonata nga mananoy,” harmonious melody), veering away from traditional poetic modes. His “status as bishop . . . also put him into a nationalist framework of loyalty to God and country,” wrote Evasco, “a subject tackled in many of his love poems.” Consider this poem titled “Sa Kabulakan sa Akong Yuta,” along with my translation into the English, “To The Flowers of My Homeland”:
Kamo mao ang Suga nga sa yuta ko nagaiwag,
Bitoon sa dagat sa batid nga magsasakay,
Ug sa Pilipinas masigang banagbanag,
Nga sa kangitngit sa gabii nagasalikway.Kaanyag ug kahumut nga dili ikapananglit
Sa tanan nga mga bulak sa tibuok kalibutan,
Ang babaying Pilipinhon tabunon nga panit,
Matam-is awiton dinhi niining kadagatan.*
You are the Glow casting light upon my land,
A guiding Star to the masterly sailor,
In the break of dawn in the Philippines,
Overthrowing the dimness of the night.With your unparalleled allure and aroma
All flowers in the world pale in comparison,
The cocoa brown skin of the Filipino woman,
A sweet song crooned here by the sea.
Women and motherland, motherland-as-woman, and women of the motherland are pervading themes for Binisayâ poets who tread both Nationalistic and Romantic strains, refusing to settle in one, something I have also observed in the poems of Buyser’s contemporaries Angel L. Enemecio and Pantaleon V. Kardenas. But such lines, testament to “poetry as an expression of fine sentiment, heightened in diction, formal and measured, and strongly aural in appeal,” place Buyser’s poetry as “versatile, moral, and often mystical,” as described by National Artist for Literature Resil B. Mojares. This recalls the old bards from AM radio. Literary historian and poet Erlinda Kintanar Alburo even considers him at the centre of the metaphysical school within Binisayâ poetry. In the first study of poetry in the Binisayâ language, Arte de la Lengua Zebuana [Art of the Cebuano Language] (published circa 1801-1804), Spanish Augustinian friar Francisco Encina (1715-1760) describes Binisayâ poetry as “very discrete and enigmatic” and the precolonial Bisaya people as “having several excellent genres of verse” (both translations mine). Encina further points out “metafora” and enigma as its key components. Buyser’s body of work, if seen through the lens of what is problematically relegated as regional literatures is an example of how the folk rural landscape is consumed as a literary text by the urban, middle-class reader. (In Philippine centre-periphery orientation, the regional is anything written neither in English nor in Tagalog-based Filipino, anything written by someone not on the radar of imperial Manila, or any way multiple layers of privilege give rise to such flawed relegation.) As in his works in other genres and even works by his contemporaries, the dominant tone of nostalgia hints at the subtle awareness of the I-persona, most likely an authorial stand-in, of the changing economic and industrial landscape. In other words, more oral, less literate; more peripheral, less central.
In poetry in translation, at least for a Filipino translator like me, are the two schools of thought represented by two figures that lie at extreme polarities: Ramon Echevaria (“rendering any great poem into another language should adhere as closely as possible to the sense and style of the original . . . without violating meanings and effects . . . sense, sounds, tone and rhythm . . . reflecting and echoing the original voice”) and Doreen G. Fernandez (“[translated] poetry must be shaped to its times, to the events that determine the quality of life; to the needs and the sensibility that seek expression then . . . if it is to be alive, [should not] remain untouched by the city, the machine, and the events”). Both, I daresay, are true. I would like to think of Echevaria’s thesis as a proposal to create newfound, never-before-thought-of ways of writing in the target language, one that expands possibilities as the source text superimposes on, or gives more layers to, the translation. Fernandez, on the other hand, is reminiscent of Foucauldean transformation as an essential theme of archives, a reminder of its fluidity. So as an emerging translator, I have settled with adopting either on a case-to-case basis. A translated text could be a product of multiple strategies after all. Autumn Richardson, in my interview with her, would perfectly verbalise this: “I’m not dogmatic in my choices—it’s more instinctual.”
Looking past my religious and linguistic connections with Buyser, I went on to further and repeated self-inquiries—what else is at stake here? and why translate him? I began with no blueprint or model to start with (“less an outline . . . toward a foregone conclusion, [more] an unmapped quest,” as said by John D’Agata), only archival manuscripts, random and disparate (“the order of things is not the same order of ideas,” in the words of Theodor W Adorno). Is this my response to Ricci and van der Putten’s call that “translation into, and from, many Asian languages . . . to a large extent remain obscure or, at best, fragmentary”? Why translate in the first place, when even seasoned bilingual poets and English-to-Binisayâ/Binisayâ-to-English translators like Evasco admit to the “intrinsic untranslatability of a poem’s musical body . . . [its] substance can only be reshaped in another language, and hopefully, if the translation is any good, it can evoke the power of its sensibility (which is the musical core of the poem’s mind)”? Expanding on the dearth of translation to and from Cebuano Binisayâ, Mojares posits a compelling answer:
As in the past, the flow of translation has been from the outside. Few works in Cebuano have been translated into other languages, whether foreign or Philippine. This is essentially a problem of power: Cebuano has historically been relegated to a position subordinate to Spanish, English, and Tagalog. The concentration of state power and media resources in a Tagalog-speaking primate region and the promotion of Tagalog as ‘base’ for the national language, or as the national language itself, have marginalized regional languages like Cebuano. As a consequence, the development of Cebuano has been stunted: the language is not formally studied in the schools, the literature is only marginally considered in Philippine literature courses, Cebuano-language publications lead a struggling existence, and there is little state promotion of Cebuano language and letters. Cebuano has not fully entered into either the ‘national literature’ or the ‘national language.’
Beyond the source and target languages, perpetually present are the tensions between textual faithfulness and linguistic subversion (or to put it mildly, creative experimentation). I also grappled with translational authority with respect to his Binisayâ language that is temporally and geolinguistically distant from mine: temporal, because most of his writings are concentrated in the 1920s, and geolinguistic, because he used a dialectical variant of Binisayâ spoken and written in Leyte and Cebu whilst mine is that of Northern Mindanao. There is also an issue with his cisgender heterosexual male gaze, almost messianic, towards his written subjects, reflected in his portrayals of nature-as-female and of a Motherland that is a perpetual damsel in distress, in need of his saving. (My queer self, for instance, is not pleased with one of his pennames, Pareng Bayot or Paring Bayot [Gay Priest], but even a noncelibate clergy could dream, right?). This comes as no surprise given his Romantic and pastoral themes of nature, human sentiment, and the quotidian.
But central to my impetus of rendering Buyser into English is the joy of translating from the archives, specifically, “the thrill of tracking down forgotten stories, the pure excitement of uncovering the lives of neglected players, and the joy of finally being able to connect up seemingly unrelated dots . . . to explor[e] translation history . . . to look beyond the texts, to explore the human side of translation, to . . . examine their lives and working environment,” to borrow from Mary Bardet. Although I could hardly reconcile Buyser as one of the neglected or forgotten. “Access to archives,” according to Jeremy Munday, “enables a detailed picture to be constructed of the role of translation in concrete socio-historical contexts.” Because something is oddly satisfying in unearthing that which has been long buried. A palm reader once told me in detail about one of my past lives as an explorer of shipwrecks. My astrological birth chart agrees—allow me to speak in ancient Hellenistic term—it’s the Saturnian and Piscean in me, manifested in my unexplainable love for people and things past, even the scent of yellowed, decaying pages of old forgotten books and the fragile unevenness of their texture. And no, this is not some romanticised Tumblr or Pinterest aesthetic propaganda. In my former university, I had become an annoying borrower, if not The Annoying Borrower, from the part of the library where the very old books and microfiches are housed. Much to the dismay of those librarians and student assistants (and years later, my therapists), I have this strange affinity for the bygone. But then again, why would they be disturbed when findability and access are among the very theoretical frameworks of archivistics, or archival science? Needless to say, such affinity is what led me to translating texts from antiquity like the poetry of Buyser, Enemecio, and Kardenas, the short prose of Vicente Rama, and even excerpts from booklets of novenas and horoscopes, both in the archaic Binisayâ.
But above all, when translating from the archive, how does one like me, a queer millennial Filipino educated with Western theories, continually recheck the imposition of my own voice unto the text, or what Theo Hermans calls “discursive presence” or, as some other translators would call it, “mediating presence”? When the translator’s voice confronts the author’s—or is it the other way around?—what gives? The postcolonialists have used discursive presence to mean colonialism, perhaps a homage to a time when Edward Said first coined the term, as far as I know. But this is used in a slightly different context in literary translation, or is it not? To translate Buyser, after all, is to also translate someone in the cishetero, able-bodied canon, and in the logic of centre-periphery orientation, what do I know about the canon when I have become an unwilling expert of exclusion, when I have long ago decided that marginality is my new skin? To translate Buyser, too, is to translate a representative of writings from his era (1900s to 1940s), what literary historians pigeonholed as the golden age of Binisayâ poetry, a generation of writers long gone. And sometimes, I thank god, and the sentient universe, for that.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote Journal’s editor-at-large for the Philippines. They’re the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and Atlas & Alice, and editorial reader at Creative Nonfiction magazine. Their works of translation from the oeuvre of transgender writer Stefani J Alvarez appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation (England), Asymptote (Taiwan), Rusted Radishes (Lebanon), Tolka (Ireland), and anthologised in the Oxford Anthology of Translation; and from the Binisayâ folklore in Reliquiae: Journal of Landscape, Nature, and Mythology (Scotland). They currently translate from the archives of pre-Second World War Philippine literature written in Spanish and Binisayâ. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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