Wanted: more literary translators

A reader named Monching Romano — who runs www.divisoria.com and www.diliman republic.com — wrote in to ask for some help in looking for new Philippine fiction in Filipino for libraries in the United States. “We’ve been selling Philippine books online since 2000,” Monching says. “Aside from our overseas Pinoy customers, we also have US libraries ordering from us for their Asian/Philippine sections. Our latest inquiry is an order for 50 titles of Philippine Fiction in Tagalog published from 2005 and above. We’ve contacted the usual suppliers — National Book Store and University presses — but we can’t seem to fill-up the list for 50 titles. We also have an inquiry for 30 titles of Children’s Fiction also in Tagalog. Would you be able to suggest other publishers/suppliers where we can probably get more titles? Maraming salamat po.”

I have a feeling that this shouldn’t be a problem — seeing all those new titles coming out of the annual Manila book fair, for example, and knowing how many new young authors in Filipino have been getting published recently — but to speed things up for Monching, let me ask readers and publishers who may have titles to contribute to write Monching Romano directly at monching@divisoria.com.

This should be a great break for writers in Filipino, considering that it’s the writers in English who’ve very often gotten all the international exposure, through fellowships, grants, and invitations to writers’ festivals. As one of the latter beneficiaries, I can’t complain, but I point out whenever I can in these international venues that our literature is much more diverse than our offerings in English would seem to suggest, and that we have exciting new writing being done in Filipino and other Philippines languages.

What’s been sorely lacking is a systematic, adequately funded program of translation, from our own languages into English and other international languages. I’ve often been asked — by the well-intentioned but unknowing — why writers don’t translate their own work. A very few (such as poets Marne Kilates and Mikael de Lara Co, who’ve performed the service for others) might be able to, but most can’t — or even shouldn’t — because translation is an art unto its own, requiring not only a mastery of both languages but also an acute sensitivity to how ideas, emotions, and cultural nuances carry over (or don’t) from one language to the other. Working at a certain distance from the subject (unlike an author whose nose practically scrapes his or her own words on the page), a good translator might even be able to see and to accentuate things the author can’t.

Not only is translation an art; it’s a professional skill that people train for, people who might not be master poets or fictionists themselves, but who possess a literary sensibility that allows them to see and respect the author’s design, and the linguistic ability to reinterpret that in another tongue. In some cases, author and translator become almost inseparable, a kind of literary love team: Pablo Neruda and W. S. Merwin; Italo Calvino and William Weaver; Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gregory Rabassa.

Translators free the text from what could be the prison of one’s own language. Not all authors may want or need to be read abroad, and indeed I would suggest that most of us would rather be read by own people first than by foreigners, but literature, like the other arts, will seek to rise above borders and boundaries. I’ve always thought that if it’s any good, then it deserves to be shared. Unfortunately, you can’t do that without being translated, if you don’t write in one of the global languages.

There are some efforts underway — in the NCCA, for example — to remedy that situation. We hope to be able to support and to recognize translators, especially those who can translate novels that we can sell or promote abroad, through such means as the Man Asia Literary Prize and editors and agents willing to look at our manuscripts.

But over the long term, we need more than that — for example, courses, even degrees, in translation in our premier universities. Unless we invest in this enterprise, many of our finest works will never be appreciated abroad — a double tragedy, since we hardly appreciate them even here at home.

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Speaking of language, let me turn over the rest of this week’s column to one of our finest poets and critics, Dr. Gemino Abad, who had this to say about “new writing” in a recent meeting of Philippine PEN, the writers’ organization. This is just an excerpt from his brief remarks, but they bring another way of seeing to an old subject. Jimmy says:

“None, I should think; or, less emphatically, only very rarely. There are only new writers. Each one in contention primarily with himself. Each one a subject of his own times — that is, the fluid history and culture of his own people — and perhaps, sometimes, a rebel in his own right or without cause.

“It can be shown, from the other side of my own argument now, that every writing is somehow new. But for the writer himself to claim that his writing is new is hubris.

“Every writer only finds his own path through language, and after a time, discovers his own distinctive subject.

“He finds his language within the given natural language that he employs, that he works, as a farmer works the soil for his crop. He writes from a given natural language that he has mastered, and may invent words and phrases, perhaps even an individual grammar or syntax, from the language’s own incremental store and resources, and from ways of thinking and figures of thought in his own culture. 

“Any given natural language has its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax: those are the fountainhead of its communicative power, and one transgresses them at his own peril. But any language too has inner resources from the infinite possibilities of its vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, their figures and rhetoric: those are the fountainhead of its expressive or evocative power, and one is circumscribed only by his imagination by which, sometimes, by assiduously working the language, he might transcend its inadequacies or limitations

“So then, after a time — a long, persevering time — the writer’s language becomes essentially his alone, both its matter — and its manner, by which its matter is endowed with its interpretative form.”

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.