Place: Philippines

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 14, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and MARGENTO

The latest in letters from Ireland and the Philippines!

This week, our editors-at-large bring us the latest in arts festivals, awards, and innovative adaptations across the literary landscape! From new spins on James Joyce’s Ulysses for its hundredth anniversary to a thriving theatre festival in the Philippines, read on to learn more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Ireland 

It is festival time across Europe, and Galway, Ireland’s West Coast pearl, is gearing up for its International Arts Festival (GIAF), to kick off in 3 days and go on through July 30. The “balmy, bohemian” city (as ireland.com poetically describes it) is already buzzing with the vibe as events ranging from special-effect-rich theatrical, musical, and circus performances to public conversations with awarded war-covering journalists and writers are boisterously advertised on seafront billboards, dedicated websites, local TV and radio stations, and even on announcement screens on greyhounds across the country. 

On the literary front, James Joyce’s spirit looms as large as ever—and particularly so on the hundredth anniversary of Ireland’s most notorious book ever, Ulysses—only now in more playful and cross-artform shades. Ulysses 2.2, a collaborative project between ANU, Landmark Productions, and Museum of Literature Ireland, will be featured with two independent acts. The first one will be You’ll See, an obvious word-play on, and homophone of, Joyce’s title, produced by Branar, one of Ireland’s leading theatre companies for children. You’ll See has been announced as a mix of “live performance, intricate paper design, an original score, and Joyce’s odyssey” that will enchant prior fans as well as all those who haven’t read the book yet.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 2, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Carol Khoury

Literary news from Palestine, Bulgaria, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors bring you the latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and the Philippines! From a major award win to exciting literary festivals, read on to find out more!

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

On Wednesday, May 24, most Bulgarians woke up later than usual. After all, the country was commemorating its Alphabet, Enlightenment, and Culture Day, and the festivities would not begin before noon. The night owls, however, had already started celebrating much earlier as media outlets from all over the globe notified them that, at a ceremony in Central London, writer Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel had been awarded the 2023 International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022) whose primary focus is the “weaponization of nostalgia.” The duo, whom Asymptote has previously highlighted, gave a heartfelt speech about the stories that keep us alive and resist evil.

Later the same day, Gospodinov posted on his official Facebook page: “Blessed holiday! Blessed miracle of language! I was lucky enough to say these words in Bulgarian last night at the Booker Prize ceremony in the heart of London! On the eve of the most beautiful holiday! I wrote this book with the thirty letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. I am grateful to everyone who believed in it! To my readers with whom we have been together for years. It was and still is a long road. To the writers before me from whom I have learned! To the Bulgarian writers for all they have suffered and written. I am grateful for the joy I saw in Bulgaria after the announcement of the award last night. Joy because of a book is pure joy. Thank you! It is possible! May it open the door to Bulgarian culture and give us courage.”

Courage, if I may add, to remain sensitive to life’s delicate intricacies. Courage to be mindful of the past in our eternal battle for the future. Courage to translate even the “unspoken speeches for all unreceived awards.”

And the rest is history. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 31, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

The latest literary news from the United States, Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora, and the Philippines!

This week’s roundup of literary news from around the world highlights exciting new publications and publishing trends! From a literary marriage in the United States to the return of a beloved author and history titles in the Philippines, read on to find out more!

Meghan Racklin, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the United States

Last week, at their annual awards ceremony—in person again for the first time since the onset of the pandemic—the National Book Critics Circle awarded the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize to Grey Bees by Andrew Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. The new award brings attention to books translated into English and published in the United States, where only a small number of books in translation are published each year—Publishers Weekly’s translation database lists only 419 books in translation published in the United States in 2022.

Dralyuk, the award winner, is a poet and critic as well as a translator and until recently was the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His translation was selected from a competitive group of finalists which, notably, also included the translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by Jennifer Croft—Dralyuk’s wife. Prior to the announcement of the award winner, the two gave an interview to the L.A. Times about their relationship to translation and to each other. Croft said “Once we started dating, I would find Boris on my steps, where he would tell me about what he had just translated. He gets so emotionally invested. . . . He’s so careful about every word. It was very moving and, I think, a large part of how we came together.”

READ MORE…

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…

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…

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…

What’s New in Translation: December 2022

December 12, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal and José García Escobar

New work from the Philippines and Palestine!

This week, we’re proud to present two brilliant publications from authors Hussein Barghouthi and Rogelio Braga. From the former comes a wondrous autofiction that uses the vehicle of a companionship to explore philosophies of life, memories, country, and conversation. From the latter,  a vivid collection that examines the various intersections and conflicts between life and work, concentrated in the electrifying, volatile urbanity of rush hour. Read on to find out more!

barghouthi

The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, Seagull Books, 2023 

Review by José García Escoba, EaL for Central America

Hussein Barghouthi’s The Blue Light is the story of a Palestinian writer also named Hussein, as told through his relationship with Bari, a Turkish American Sufi. Though their lives come to be somehow intertwined, one can hardly think of Hussein and Bari as friends. They’re acquaintances. They may, objectively, care for each other. There are signs of concern, empathy, and camaraderie. Solidarity, even. Pity. The connection between them is not a simple development of shared experience or mutual interest, but forms from the fleeting yet memorable encounters between the two, wherein our protagonist learns about life, the meaning of life, life after death, addiction, the mind being “an expansive entity,” and other philosophies.

—What’s the mind? I asked.
—The mind? Oh, man, it’s horrifying. See. . .
He gestured to the neon light, asphalt, skyscrapers, the pier, the closed supermarket, the university library, and said, “That’s the mind.”

Hussein, the protagonist, is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Lebanon, and goes on to study Comparative Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. Bari, on the other hand, is an elusive figure, introduced as “that Sufi from Konya.” His theories and messages are cryptic and mysterious at best, often escalating into the contradictory and nonsensical. “He wants to control my mind. He might even be a secret agent,” Hussein writes. Nevertheless, their interactions are always memorable, filled with tension, sarcasm, empathy, and dry humor—somewhat reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Within the novel’s dialogues, its characters discuss philosophical issues such as death and reincarnation, lucid dreams, the meaning of life, the meaning dreams, religion, and so on; not in an academic way, but in the discursive, organic way of friends.

On one occasion, Hussein and Sufi play chess, and their conversation veers from the meaning of Bari’s name, to the duality of bodies (mental and physical), to Arabic poetry, to Palestinian culture, and on. Eventually, however, Bari’s critical theories and aimless monologues veer into the territory of indoctrination. At one point, he asks Hussein to watch the water fall from his shower. Hussein does as he’s told, and additionally writes a poem about the experience of watching the water. “To hell with poetry,” says Bari. “Watch the water.” 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.

READ MORE…

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…

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2022)

August 4, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

What has our literary powerhouse of a crew been up to this past quarter? Read on to find out!

Editor-at-Large for the Philippines Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s original cross-genre work (part poem, part essay) will come out in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (Virginia, USA: Stillhouse Press), which is now available for pre-order. Their translation of Filipino transgender writer and past contributor Stefani J Alvarez’s short prose has also been published in the first issue of the Oxford Anthology of Translation and their book review of Shuntaro Tanikawaz’s anthology The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952-2009 (tr. Takako U. Lento, Cornell University Press) appeared in the eleventh issue of Tokyo Poetry Journal. 

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, recently presented a #GraphPoem computational performance at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2022, #DHSI22, and contributed an article on the #GraphPoem poetics of “network walks, stigmergy, and accident in performance” to the latest issue of IDEAH.

Blog Editor Erica X Eisen has found an agent to represent her debut novel, I Come from a Cold Country. An excerpt will be published in Guernica in August 2022 under the title “To Kill a Horse.”

Incoming Nonfiction Editor Ian Ross Singleton’s novel Two Big Differences will be featured alongside The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry on Punctured Lines, the blog for post-Soviet literature.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a review of Kjell Askildsen’s “Everything Like Before” out in Full Stop and an appreciation of Aimee Bender’s short story “Off” in Fiction Writers Review.

Educational Arm Assistant Mary Hillis recently reviewed Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda (tr. Alison Watts), Death on Gokumon Island by Seishi Yokomizu (tr. Louise Heal Kawai), and Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino (Giles Murray) for Asian Review of Books. 

Rachel Farmer, Chief Executive Assistant, has translated a chapbook for Strangers Press as part of their +SVIZRA series focusing on Swiss literature. Her translation is an extract of In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic by Usama Al Shahmani, a memoir of his experiences as an Iraqi refugee newly arrived on Swiss soil.

Translation Tuesdays Editor Shawn Hoo‘s translation of Singapore Literature Prize-winning writer Wong Koi Tet’s “Turtle Fever” was recently published in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation. Shawn’s debut chapbook, Of the Florids, has also recently been published by Diode Editions and is available to order here. 

Interested in joining us behind the scenes? Good news: We’ve just released our final recruitment drive of the year—check out the newly available openings and submit an application today! READ MORE…