Posts by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 24, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Katarina Gadze, and MARGENTO

Dispatches from the Philippines, Croatia, and the Romanian diaspora!

In this week’s literary roundup from around the world, people in the literary community are both paying tribute to celebrated icons and paving paths for contemporary voices. From the Romanian diaspora, an exciting new publication threads the past and present, adding to an incredible legacy of literary journals. In the Philippines, book fairs are highlighting minority languages and independent publishers. In Croatia, new literary projects orient their local communities around the act of reading and writing, as well as making intellectual space to consider the role of the political novel. 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting for the Romanian diaspora

One of the most significant recent events involving the Romanian diaspora was the debut release of the literary journal Littera Nova in Madrid, Spain, earlier this week. With an impressive range of established and emerging writers contributing literature both in original languages and in translation, alongside essays and criticism, the journal confidently joins a rich market as well as a solid and long-standing tradition. As the founding director Eugen Barz states in his prefatory note,  previous frontrunners in the literary journal landscape include post-WWII Romanian periodicals published in metropoles as diverse as Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Honolulu, and edited by legends such as Mircea Eliade, Alexandru Busuioceanu, George Uscatescu, Stefan Baciu, Vintila Horia, and many others.

In the wake of iconic late-Romantic/early-modernist Eminescu’s 173rd birthday, the issue also includes a significant number of remarkable texts referring to the great classic: an erudite and incisive essay from Asymptote past contributor Felix Nicolau drawing parallels between Eminescu and both Shakespeare and Dimitrie Cantemir; poems translated into English by K.V. Twain; and a selection from the poet’s correspondence by Ovidiu Pecican. The journal deftly balances criticism and creative writing/translation, featuring classic modernists such as Lucian Blaga and Ion Pillat (translated into Italian by Stefan Damian and Bruno Rombi, and into French by Gabrielle Danoux), and Surrealist master—and past Asymptote contributor—Gellu Naum (in English translation from Nicoleta Craete), amongst others.

The Romanian diaspora continues to contribute significant texts and translations in platforms all around the world; for example, Asymptote contributor Diana Manole has recently had one of her plays featured in EastWest Literary Forum, released a collection of new and selected poems by revered Nora Iuga (co-translated with Adam J. Sorkin), and is gearing up for the release of her own forthcoming poetry collection in Canada. Also, major diasporic poet, novelist, and critic O. Nimigean, whose rare social media posts are at times almost as impactful as his best-selling books, reasserted on Facebook the continued relevance of the late paradigmatic fiction writer and anti-Ceaușescu militant Paul Goma (himself an epitome of both domestic and exilic heroic resistance), particularly as reflected by Flori Balanescu’s recent books on the subject. READ MORE…

Inside the Prison of Her Own Skin: On Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde

February 16, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Leduc is therefore bisexual, and La Bâtarde, a bisexual text.

La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc, translated from the French by Derek Coltman, Dalkey Archive Press, 2023

“. . . very often, women think that all they need do is to tell their unhappy childhood. And so they tell it, and it has no literary value whatsoever, neither in style, nor in the universality which it ought to contain. So there are many, many autobiographies which publishers reject . . . Very disappointing . . . to think that as long as they’re women telling their story it will be interesting. . . . [but] there are extraordinary cases, like that of Violette Leduc who, exceptionally, was wonderfully successful.”

—Simone de Beauvoir, La Revue Littéraire des Femmes (March 1986)

“Being a woman, not wanting to be one,” Violette Leduc writes about her mother, Berthe, in La Bâtarde [The Bastard]. Perhaps she is speaking about herself as well, the reader takes a guess, which later in the autobiography is—spoiler alert—confirmed. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard in Paris, La Bâtarde was translated into the English by Derek Coltman (who has translated two of her other works) as La Bâtarde: An Autobiography, and released the following year by C Nicholls & Company in the United Kingdom and by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States. Over the years, at least two new editions have been published, and this year, we are given a new edition to this bestselling French autobiography from Dalkey Archive Press.

“Being a woman and therefore condemned to the miseries of the feminine condition,” echoes Simone de Beauvoir in the foreword. Like Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Robert Brasillach, and Richard Wright, Leduc is considered a historical contemporary and political protege of Beauvoir (although ecofeminist-biographer Françoise d’Eaubonne disagrees, stating that Leduc never subscribed to Beauvoir’s philosophy or politics). It may have been, however, more than that; newly discovered letters—two hundred and ninety-seven of them—have revealed Beauvoir rejecting Leduc’s repeated romantic advances.

This autobiography is unapologetic—particularly so, as Laetitia Hanin deems, because while its predecessors within Francophone women’s literature, like the memoirs of George Sand and Marie d’Agoult, sacrificed to self-mythification, Leduc did not apologise for writing the story of her life. Beginning in northern France, the author reveals a childhood spent under WWI German occupation, where the government’s rationing of food is so insufficient people resorted to stealing cabbages from the back of carts. Two maternal figures among a neighbourhood of women raise her: her mother, Berthe, with whom she has an extremely agonising and suffocating relationship (“You were all I had, mother, and you wanted me to die with you”); and her grandmother, Fidéline, “an angel” who loved her “in passionate silence.” In her youth, as an “unrecognized daughter of a son of a good family,” she yearns for a paternal figure, but she will never know her father André, a man whose dominant quality is anonymity: “It is a strange moment when you gaze questioningly at an unknown figure in a picture and the picture, the unknown figure, is your nerves, your joints, your spinal column.” Further contemplating on her lineage, Leduc writes, “I reject my heredity.” This is particularly true with her maternal relationship, when in the later years Leduc would say: “Her absence was a relief; I was oppressed by her return.” Eventually, she would burn André’s photograph along with his death certificate. She writes, “My birth is not a matter of rejoicing.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 20, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Areeb Ahmad

Literary news from Bulgaria, the Philippines, and India!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering newly released audiobooks by the unofficial “hero of the Philippines,” the passing of one of Bulgaria’s most notable political figures and literary critics, and an award-winning translator’s appearance in New Delhi. From a night of chilling literature in Sofia to a bookstagrammer’s compilation of all Indian books in translation from 2022, read on to learn more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Although usually uneventful, January has so far proved a surprise for everyone who has taken a keen interest in the Bulgarian cultural scene.

Earlier this month, the local community lost the literary critic Elka Konstantinova. Throughout her life, the scholar, who passed away at the age of ninety, managed to balance an innate passion for the written word with a desire to bring about broader societal change by being an active participant in the country’s political life. In a recent report, the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency described her as “one of the key figures in Bulgarian politics after the fall of communism in 1989.” Her research encompassed diverse topics from the relationship between the fantasy genre and the world of today to the general development of the short story during specific periods of the twentieth century.

In other news, by the time you are reading this dispatch, the French Cultural Institute in Sofia will have begun preparations for its first Reading Night (Nuit de la Lecture). The event, organized in collaboration with the National Book Centre, is set to start today, in the late afternoon, and will last well past midnight. This year, the theme is “Fear in Literature” with a focus on fairy tales, criminal investigations, fantasy, dystopian science fiction, chilling essays, and more. Younger readers and their parents will have the chance to participate in several literary workshops and specially designed games that aim to ignite the public’s enthusiasm for books and stories.

READ MORE…

Memory as Political: On Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir

January 18, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Shehadeh treats this memoir as an evocative paean towards a landscape that can never be recovered.

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh, Other Press, 2023

In Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East (2012), Norbert Bugeja defines the memoirist as operating “within that representational chasm . . . in which the memoirist’s chosen interpretation of a space or preferred schema of memory come to be reconfigured against the received facts of traditional ideological geographies and vice-versa.” In the harrowing We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir, Raja Shehadeh shows he is no exemption to this friction between fact and memory. A Ramallah-based human rights lawyer with several acclaimed memoirs (one received the 2008 Orwell Prize; another was adapted into a stage play) and scholarly essays (covering topics from international law to theatre criticism) to his name, Shehadeh is a cosmopolitan, peripatetic writer and addresses the topic of his personal history and homeland with wide-ranging expertise. According to Jonathan Cook in Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008), Shehadeh “is perhaps the most knowledgeable critic of Israel’s labyrinth of legislation in the occupied territories.” In addition to enacting activism through his writing, he also founded al-Haq in the 1970s—a Palestinian organization at the frontlines in peace negotiations and in providing legal aid to Palestinians.

In We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, his eleventh book of non-fiction, Shehadeh foregrounds the Nakba—the catastrophic aftermath of the 1948 Palestinian war. But a better appreciation of his works necessarily invites a discussion on the milieu of where he is writing from—both ethnopolitically and aesthetically. Ethnopolitically, the memoir centres the land dispossession, drone warfare, and strategic erasure of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli military government—as well as the treacheries committed by Palestine’s former coloniser, the Ingleez, Britain, and even neighbouring nations like Jordan and the League of Arab States. Aesthetically, on the other hand, the writing evokes other articles of “resistance literature,” such as those concerning Partition or occupation, as well as the larger body of Arab political essays and political memoirs that permeates Shehadeh’s œuvre: his powerful storytelling emanates from the kind of clearsighted prose afforded by forthright reportage.

Conor McCarthy favourably compared Shehadeh to Edward Said as being “more directly political,” evidently a departure from show don’t tell (a hackneyed chestnut propagated by workshop cultism because there should be, in descriptive writing, room to explain, to tell). Shehadeh takes advantage of the power in exposition even as he plays with form; the narration and the way the chapters are organised as somewhat non-linear and non-chronological, jumping from one particular time and place to another, but remain always guided by both reminiscence and research. READ MORE…

Di Antara Akses dan Penolakan / In Between Access and Refusal: A Conversation with Khairani Barokka

January 5, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the more people are made to forget the names of our relatives who are flora, fauna, sea, earth, and sky.

Much has been said about Khairani Barokka’s wide-ranging, multidisciplinary body of work, spanning literature—spoken word poetry, dystopian fiction, scholarly texts—and media—textual, visual, performance. In the journal Research in Drama Education, she is an academic exploring “the limits of access and the framing of disabled performers from non-Western backgrounds in Western contexts.” According to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, however, she is a poet of “ecocritical agenda advancing environment justice against deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, pollution, further revaluing indigeneity to the more-than-human.” 

In this interview, I asked Barokka about Modern Poetry in Translation, the London-based magazine where she serves as editor; her movement between genres; and translating from the languages of her homeland, Indonesia—including BISINDO or Indonesian Sign Language. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In your Catapult essay “The Case Against Italicizing ‘Foreign’ Words,” you made a case for maintaining an “active ethos of not italicizing supposedly foreign words,” with the hope that those in the publishing industry would follow suit. Can you speak more on how publications in the North Atlantic, and even Anglophone ones within the Global South, perpetuate a myth of “cultural purity” through linguistic gatekeeping? 

Khairani Barokka (KB): It’s been really heartening to receive the kind responses people and publications have had to that article over the past two years, and it even caused Massachusetts Review to change their house style, which was very encouraging. It’s the best feeling when colleagues say that they’ve changed the minds of editors by sending them the piece, which I hope has saved the significant amount of time we writers can spend arguing these points. 

I think the perception of certain words or names as ‘foreign’ does have to do with some publications’ regulations of house style, in which the word ‘foreign’ is not put in quotation marks, i.e., ‘Be careful with foreign words.’ And there have been some people who respond positively to my article, but still don’t put ‘foreign’ in quotation marks, when those quotation marks say a lot about gatekeeping. The ‘Other’ is fixed in many imaginations, which is interesting when you work in a country like the United Kingdom—where names and words come from so many corners of the globe, yet foreignising them is still de rigueur in many minds. Someone can be part of British society, and their name can still be regarded as ‘foreign,’ even if they’re a British citizen or born here (and of course, we can get into the hierarchies of bureaucracy and migration status!).

This has much to do with a certain ‘mythical English reader,’ which is usually assumed to be white, middle class, and monoglot; colleagues like Anton Hur have really been pushing back against this. Why can’t we, as supposed outsiders, be the idealised English reader for translations? Why isn’t the responsibility of a translation tied back to the linguistic communities it’s translated from, many members of which shouldn’t be forced to make literature ‘understandable’ to a very narrow demographic? The more we recognise these dynamics, the more we can unpack and minimise colonial tendencies in the literary arts. God knows it was assumed we as Indonesian children knew all the references in translated Enid Blyton books, for instance. It’s about cultural dominance, and the assumptions that go with that. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Cindy A. Velasquez

January 3, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Cindy A. Velasquez

But to birth new homelands, / the world has devised tremors

In the first Translation Tuesdays column of 2023, Cebuano poet Cindy A. Velasquez take us to sea as we find our bearings in the new year. With a sensuousness at once personal and geological, Velasquez’s poems look for a sense of connection in  water bodies, drifting continents and connecting islands. Start your year of reading voraciously—and widely—with us here every week!

“I first read Cindy A. Velasquez in Kabisdak: Cebuano Literary Lighthouse, edited by poet Michael U. Obenieta, and later on, in her first collection Lawas [Body]. Lawas was in so many ways antithetical from the poetry collections of Velasquez’s contemporaries within Binisayâ’s school of feminist poetics in particular, and the literary ‘Bisaya-sphere’ in general. The Oliverian lucidity is rich, far from being rife and banal, a contrast to the Instagram-Pinterest school of ‘poetry’ or the ‘hugot’ impulse that perpetually plagues the local spoken word and performance poetry scene. The islands and coastlines left and missed are seascapes we have never been to but have always known. And then, there is Dong, a recurring or haunting character almost always addressed like an apostrophe, whom the poetic I-persona, Day or Inday, perpetually yearns for.

Velasquez’s body of works is a lingering on bodies of women and water as well as a story of love, romantic, familial, platonic. Oceanic in topicality, her poems could be read through the lens of ‘sea-poetry’—a literary tradition from Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, to the British Romanticists writing about the English channel and even Derek Walcott—very male, mostly white, very Western. Be that as it may, I find the act of reading Velasquez an evocation of the tender eroticism of Syria’s national poet Nizar Qabbani, the meditative ease of Brazilian neosymbolist Cecília Meireles, and the hydropoetic enigma of T’ang dynasty Taoist elegist Ts’ao T’ang. 

But she doesn’t try to be any of the above. Her writing is her own accord; she is a poet of her own island.”

—Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The Reason

Theory of continental drift: the continents were once one,
bound to each other, and we have been told that the origin
of one is also another’s. But to birth new homelands,
the world has devised tremors deep in its own core.

So fret not when now and again, as you hold onto
my hand, it would swiftly quiver until you let me go.

Why is it better to love only one

I.

You gazed at the dimmed skies, enraged once more
for the moonlight was found wanting

then I told you: “Would you be more pleased if this world
had two moons?  READ MORE…

Leave From or Arrive There: A Conversation with Rima Rantisi

December 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Form offers freedom, but also creativity, another layer through which to see, and ultimately create.

Biography, The University of Hawaii Press’s quarterly academic journal, surveys the contemporary landscape of Lebanese and Arab women’s memoirs. In this, they have named Rima Rantisi as among the champions of “highly intimate personal narratives,” whose work portray their own “constructions of home.” As an essayist, Rantisi inhabits interiorities, taking time in its own tracts, but also incites reexaminations of how we think of (and therefore, how we read and write) the external—places we dwell in all our lives and have always felt ourselves to know. As an editor, she is a nonbeliever of geographic boundaries, welcoming works of art and literature from the ‘Arab-adjacent’ regions. How does she write about home, something ideally stable, when it happens to be a city that is ever-changing and fluid, a mere construct?

In this interview, I asked Rantisi about Rusted Radishes, the Beirut-based multilingual and interdisciplinary journal of art and literature she co-founded; framing the memoir as a genre within place-based writing; and contemporary Arabic and Anglophone literatures written from Lebanon and its diaspora.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): There is a point in your essay “Waiting” where you write about O’Hare Airport: “Each time I leave from or arrive there, I am away—from people I love, from other homes. I am reaching, always.” Can you speak more about this metaphorical always being away, always on the move? 

Rima Rantisi (RR): Home is one of those subjects that Lebanese writers and artists are intimately familiar with, and sometimes in ways they prefer not to be. But because of the country’s modern history of war and migration, complex conceptions of home are inevitable. For me, I was raised by Lebanese immigrants in the United States, in the small town of Peoria, Illinois. Later, I made a new home where I went to college in Chicago. And then I moved across the world to Beirut. The move to Beirut is when the ever-present awareness of place began to take form. Not only because it was so different from where I had come from, but also Lebanon now became a new lens to see the world through—including my parents, world politics, my past and future. One place that brings these places together is O’Hare Airport. It had always been exciting for me to travel from there as a Midwesterner, but now it gives me a deeper sense of distance between who I was in the United States, and who I am now in Lebanon. In this sense, “I am away” both physically and metaphorically. One thing we don’t talk about as much is how place changes us; not only does it affect us emotionally, but it changes our perception of the world, and the language we use to communicate it. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Kristina Tatarian, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Armenia, the Philippines, and Kenya!

This week, our editors on the ground are watching out for multilingual poetry events, emerging Armenian writers, solidarity in language and literature, the favourite texts of Filipino readers, translation in Southeast Asia, dialogues between authors in Nairobi, and PEN/HEIM Translation Grants winners. Read on to find out more!

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Armenia

The beautiful auditorium of the Carfesjian Center for the Arts, located at the Cascade Complex in Yerevan, is a frequent stage for literary readings. On the night of October 8, the center hosted a performance as part of antiBabylon, a multilingual poetry event that brought together literary communities from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova and Germany. Organised by PANDA Platforma, an NGO from Berlin, the event took place in Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine, as poets visited each other’s countries for joint workshops and performances to create, translate, and perform. The Project’s aim is to create a “free multilingual poetic space,” and test if poetry can answer the most burning existential questions of today’s troubled world.

On the same day, IALA’s Emerging Writers Showcase took place online. This showcase featured readings from Armenian authors championed by the organisation as mentees or winners of the Young Armenian Poet Award. By supporting emerging literary talent, the organisation adds to the global effort of Armenian artists to accelerate cultural revival in the country.

The Armenian diaspora around the world plays a crucial part of setting the cultural agenda for Armenian literature, and now, the groundbreaking collection We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora, edited by Aram Mjorian, is available from University of Texas Press. The collection will feature essays from writers and poets of Armenian origin, shedding light on diverse experiences of “Armenianness” and personal perspectives on ethnicity, identity, and the sense of home. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 25, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and MARGENTO

The latest from Romania and the Philippines!

In this week’s literary round-up, we’re bringing coverage from the myriad intrigues of world literature, from storybooks highlighting Indigenous narratives to diasporic Romanian writers, romance writing to exiled heroes. Read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Romania 

As the Romanian literary scene is gearing up for the twenty-ninth edition of Gaudeamus book fair, organized by Radio Romania in Bucharest from December 7 through the 11, the literary diaspora is both very active and a hot topic in and of itself. A one-day seminar, entitled “European Cultural Representations of Romanian Migration and Exiles” took place at the Romanian Centre, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) last week. Presentations and roundtables on highlights from the Romanian diaspora across the Western world—such as religious studies international icon and fiction writer Mircea Eliade, Romanian-Spanish comparative literature pioneer Alexandre [Alejandro] Cioranescu, and former Asymptote contributor Matéi Visniec—were complemented by excursuses into the work and lives of personalities relevant to both Romanian and Spanish literatures. Former Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau, Director of the Romanian Centre and Romanian Language and Literature Lecturer, gave a talk about Alexandru Busuioceanu: a poet, art historian, and essayist credited for establishing Romanian as an academic subject at UCM back in the mid-twentieth century, after founding the UCM Romanian Centre in 1943.

Another major name of the diaspora is Paul Goma, renowned opponent of Ceaușescu’s regime and dissident fiction writer forced into exile (to Paris, France) in the late 1970s, after having survived numerous attempts on his life staged by the Romanian communist secret police or their accessories—only to die from COVID in 2020. A hot-off-the-press book dedicated to the dissident hero by historian, poet, essayist, and Goma scholar Flori Balanescu, Paul Goma: Conștiință istorică și conștiință literară [Historical Conscience, Literary Conscience], is to be launched at Gaudeamus in a week’s time, and it has already grabbed considerable attention on social media. Awarded poet and fiction writer O. Nimigean, himself a Parisian exile, commented on the text as a breakthrough release and expressed his impatience to read the sequel—an already planned book he indirectly disclosed as having insider knowledge on. Such updates can only further stir interest—if not inevitable kerfuffle—since the (albeit rare) publications about Goma expose, just as the author’s own novels did, the collaborationism under communism of certain established literati or public figures: an implication to which the latter usually retort with accusations of anti-semitism. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 28, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Andriana Hamas

The latest in literary developments from the Philippines, the Hispanophone US, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors report on the state of regional, multilingual literature from the Philippines, the Feria internacional del libro de Nueva York, and the Frankfurt Book Fair and its presentation of Bulgarian writing. Read on to find out more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Panel discussions on publishing and writing served as pre-workshop events to the forthcoming Cordillera Creative Writing Workshop (CCWW). Dubbed Hobwal, book talks were co-presented by indie presses Milflores Publishing, Baguio Writers Group, and multilingual children’s book publisher Aklat Alamid. Ryan Guinaran, Dumay Solinggay, Richard Kinnud, and Sherma Benosa, writers working in Ibaloy, Kankanaey, Ifugao, and Ilokano respectively, spotlighted the panel on writing in the mother tongue. Last year’s workshop instalment featured panelists like Genevieve L Asenjo, International Writing Programme alumna and De La Salle University-MFA Creative Writing program faculty, known for her writings in/translation from the Kinaray-a and Hiligaynon. Other discussions centred on pandemic writings, Baguio City’s literary cartography, and climate fiction.

The University of the Philippines-Baguio’s College of Arts & Communication, and Cordillera Studies Center grant CCWW fellowships to emerging poets, fictionists, and essayists writing in 15 northern Luzon languages—from Bontoc to Ivatan, Kalinga to Gaddang, and major languages Kapampangan, Ilokano, Pangasinan, Filipino, and English. In a country where national writing workshops, awards, prizes, and festivals put premium to English and Filipino, so-called regional endeavours like the CCWW have epitomised what it means to be multilingual, thus sincerely national. READ MORE…

El traductor y defensor del lenguaje / The Translator-as-Advocate: An Interview with Jerome Herrera 

October 17, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

It was not until I began working in Manila that I realized just how special the Chavacano language is. It’s funny how absence creates fondness.

When asked why he translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic The Little Prince into his native tongue, Jerome Herrera had this to say: love of, pride for, and respect to the Chavacano language. A hypernym for the several varieties of Asia’s only Spanish-based creole, Chavacano is reportedly spoken by almost a million Filipinos as their first language. Among these varieties are Chavacano de Caviteño (or “kitchen Spanish,” as Jose Rizal called it in a work by Gina Apostol), the now-extinct Chavacano de Ermiteño (once spoken in the Manila neighbourhood of Ermita), Chavacano de Ternateño or Bahra (a Ternate municipality in Cavite Province), Chavacano de Cotabateño (Cotabato City), Chavacano de Abakay (Davao City but presumed to be extinct), and Chavacano de Zamboangueño, the native tongue to almost half a million people—mostly in Zamboanga City where Herrera grew up. 

In contemporary history, Herrera’s is the fourth translation of The Little Prince into a Philippine language, which first appeared in Tagalog-based Filipino (by Lilia F. Antonio in 1969 and then Desiderio Ching in 1991), then the Central Bikol or Bikol Naga language (by Fr. Wilmer S. Tria in 2011). Most of these titles, I suspect, are translations from the English—translations of translations.

In this interview, I asked Herrera about El Diutay Principe, his translation into the Zamboangueño Chavacano of Saint-Exupéry’s novella, devising a practical orthography towards a language that is departing from its original Castilian Spanish meaning, and other geolinguistic issues in translating into the mother tongue.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Growing up, how was the Chavacano language instilled in you? Was it taught in school? 

Jerome Herrera (JH): My elementary school days were not very favorable towards the Chavacano language because I studied at a Christian school, where speaking it in class was discouraged. I guess this was a time in the nation’s history when they were trying very hard to promote Tagalog—I won’t call it Filipino for political reasons—as the national language. 

Even with my inauspicious beginnings, I grew up with Chavacano all around me. At home, my dad would listen to radio news programs and watch TV news programs in Chavacano all the time and occasionally, I would even hear mass in Chavacano. At the public high school I went to, Chavacano was used heavily by the teachers (as a medium of instruction) as well as students; however, I had already become used to speaking only Tagalog at school and, after six years, the fear of getting reprimanded for speaking Chavacano was heavily embedded in my mind.

Even in college, I had a hard time accepting the fact that speaking Chavacano was allowed in the classroom, but during this time, I had already slowly begun speaking Chavacano with some friends and even with teachers. So until the age of twenty, I had mostly spoken it only at home and with family. The Chavacano subject was reintroduced in schools only in 2012.

READ MORE…

Finding Fernando A. Buyser: The Poet-as-Archival, the Archive-as-Poetic

October 5, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

But central to my impetus of rendering Buyser into English is the joy of translating from the archives. . .

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.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

September 23, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Carol Khoury

Literary dispatches from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Palestine!

This week, our editors on the ground report on the loss of a pivotal figure in the indigenous literature of the Philippines, the Palestinian Book Fair held amidst the politics of occupation, and the Autumn Salon of the Arts in Plovdiv. Read on to find out more.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

The Philippine literary community mourns the passing of Higaonon Manobo novelist, poet, and translator Telesforo S ‘T.S.’ Sungkit, Jr. Sir Jun, as we fondly call him, also wrote as Anijun Mudan Udan, and his work represented the voice of the Higaonon, one of the eighteen ethnolinguistic indigenous peoples groups collectively known as Lumad, original inhabitants of the southern Philippine supraregional island Mindanao.

Writing in and translating from four languages, Higaonon (sometimes referred to as Binukid), Cebuano Binisayâ, (Tagalog-based) Filipino, and English, Sir Jun received fellowships from the 2005 IYAS National Writers Workshop (De La Salle University—Bienvenido N Santos Creative Writing Centre) and the 12th Iligan National Writers Workshop (Mindanao State University-IIT and Mindanao Creative Writers Group). His first novel, Batbat hi Udan [Story of Udan], came out in 2009 and was considered as the first epic novel from Bukidnon, his home province. In 2007, he won the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Writers Prize for another novel Mga Gapnod sa Kamad-an [Driftwood on Dry Land] first serialised in Bisaya Magasin and later, self-translated into the English under the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2013. Just this year, a translation of this novel from the Binisayâ into the Filipino secured the Rolando Tinio Translators Prize for the novel category.

Sir Jun’s third novel Ang Agalon sa mga Balod [The Lord of the Waves] bagged another NCCA Writers Prize in 2013, and is forthcoming from the University of the Philippines Press as Panginoon ng mga Alon—self-translated into the Filipino. (An excerpt is available from Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature.) In 2014, another novel Mga Tigmo sa Balagbatbat [Balagbatbat’s Riddles] received a National Book Development Board grant. In most of his short stories and novels, the structure veers away from the generic Western plot, being instead influenced by the nanangen oral storytelling ingrained to the Higaonon people and other Lumad. Other works of his can be read in Kabisdak: Cebuano Literary Lighthouse and BukidnonNews.net, where he once served as literary editor. (You can read his well-anthologised poem “I, Higaonon” from Australia-based Cordite Poetry Review here.) READ MORE…

A Wanting to Not Forget: An Interview with Autumn Richardson

September 7, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

There’s something about that interstitial state—between one language and another—that is extraordinarily powerful.

In Landmarks (2015), British writer Robert Macfarlane’s meditation on place, he named Autumn Richardson, among other writers, as “particularizers … who seek in some way to ‘draw every needle’ … [with] precision of utterance as both a form of lyricism and a species of attention.” Reliquiae, the journal of landscape, nature, and mythology which Richardson co-founded and co-edits with her partner, composer, writer, and artist Richard Skelton, is guided by this ethos and mode of engagement. In its ten years, Reliquiae has published texts from antiquity: Navajo songs; the Song dynasty poet Wáng Ānshí; magical and medicinal incantations from Catawba, Klamath, Chuckchee, and Winnebago peoples; southern African beliefs in naming stars; fragments from the German Renaissance alchemist-theologian Paracelsus; evocations to Yoruba deities; the Náhuatl poet Nezahualcóyotl; Egyptian spells; and hymns of the now-extinct Eoran language in Australia. The journal has also introduced readers to English translations from, among others, the original Algonquian, Binisayâ, Old English, Ancient Greek, Hindu, Old Icelandic, Iglulingmiut, Old Norse, Scottish Gaelic, West Saxon—along with their source texts.

Speaking to the precision and attention that guides her work, Richardson tells academic journal Studies in Travel Writing, “My own writing is more concerned with movement through landscapes … the vertical, going down through the layers botanically, biologically, geologically, etymologically, historically.” In this interview, I asked about the wondrous archive of Reliquiae, and how she explores landscape, ethnology, (vertical) travel, ecology, botany, and occultism in her own art, writings, and translations.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Personally, I think of Reliquiae—and its disciplinary breadth of landscape, folklore, ecology, esoteric philosophy, animism—as a treasure trove of consequential importance not only to specialists, writers, and translators, but also for a generalist readership. In the submission guidelines, there is emphasis on “beyond plain nature writing.” Can you elaborate on this?

Autumn Richardson (AR): Fundamentally, Reliquiae fills a niche that is shaped by our own unique interests. We couldn’t find a single publication that focused on landscape and the natural world, whilst refracting that focus through the prism of myth, esotericism, magic, occult philosophy, and anthropology. One of the reasons we formed Corbel Stone Press in 2009 was to begin publishing work that connected these disparate but allied disciplines. We began by publishing our own writing, but our goal was always to edit a journal, and 2022 is the tenth anniversary of Reliquiae.

AMMD: Let’s talk about Heart of Winter, your 2016 collection of found-poems assembled from the journals of ethnologist Knud Rasmussen and botanist Dr Thorild Wulff which chronicles the Second Thule Expedition, their 1917 journey through the north-western coastal landscapes of Greenland. When asked about your translation process from the Danish (and Inuit), you responded that, “it was a process of simplifying ever so slightly … [not wanting] to change [Rasmussen’s] words hardly at all … want[ing] to preserve his voice.” As a translator who questions her own discursive presence in the text, does this imply that between the competing ideologies within the translation of myths and folklore, you favour linguistic faithfulness over stylistic realism?

AR: That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m not dogmatic in my choices—it’s more instinctual. I’m acutely attentive to the shape, texture, and colour of each word in both languages when I translate. However, I have noticed that provisional, literal translations are strangely compelling. There’s something about that interstitial state—between one language and another—that is extraordinarily powerful. This can often happen, for example, when the word order of the original is preserved, resulting in an unusual word-grouping in the translation. For me, I find this shadow presence of the original language unspeakably rich and evocative, and I always try to retain something of its colour in my work. My concern is always to mirror, as faithfully as possible, the poet’s choice of words, as well as what I perceive to be the emotions and motivations behind the poem or song itself. For example, within the Inuit songs in Heart of Winter, a primary and repetitive motif is the uncertainty of survival, and the consequent gratitude or joy when a new season is witnessed, when nourishment is attained. It was immensely important to me to try to carry these sentiments forward, because, to my mind, these expressions and emotions were the heart and the purpose of the songs themselves.

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