We translated ourselves out of existence

By Noel Galon de Leon

Let’s admit it. We Filipinos have a complicated relationship with our own words. We celebrate our writers, yes, but mostly when they write in English. We call it “world-class” when a Filipino wins an international award in a foreign tongue, yet we barely glance at those who write in Hiligaynon, Cebuano, Waray, or Bikol. Somewhere along the way we learned to equate translation into English with progress and to confuse accessibility with superiority. In doing so, we have slowly translated ourselves out of existence.

This erasure did not happen overnight. It began with the colonial classroom where English was the ticket to intelligence and advancement. Decades later, the pattern persists. Publishers prefer English manuscripts, universities prioritize English syllabi, and readers automatically assume that a book written in English is somehow more “serious.” The result is a national literature that mirrors our anxiety—eloquent but uprooted, prolific but provincial in its own home.

Consider the case of Magdalena Jalandoni, the prolific Hiligaynon novelist who wrote Juanita Cruz in 1949. Her work tackled class, gender, and colonial hangovers with the subtle precision of a social critic. Yet today she is barely mentioned outside of regional circles. Why? Not because her writing lacks brilliance, but because it is written in a language the Philippine literary establishment has quietly deemed unmarketable. We praise Jalandoni as a “local treasure,” then leave her untranslated, unread, and unrepresented in our national canon. She remains a ghost in our own house of letters.

The irony is painful. When we translate Filipino works into English, we often do it not to bridge cultures but to seek validation. Translation becomes an act of submission, a passport into the global marketplace rather than a dialogue between equals. We polish our rough edges, simplify our metaphors, and flatten our cadences so that the Western reader won’t get lost. What remains is an imitation of ourselves that is smooth, readable, and soulless.

Yet translation doesn’t have to be betrayal. Done with care, it can be resistance. It can carry the rhythm of our vernaculars, the humor of our idioms, and the defiance of our syntax. But that requires faith, faith in the worth of our own languages and in the idea that a story written in Hiligaynon or Kankanaey has as much right to the global stage as one written in English. Sadly, our institutions have not caught up. While countries like Japan and Korea invest heavily in translating their literature outward, we still treat our regional languages as quaint souvenirs from the past.

This is why events like the Frankfurt Book Fair matter. When the Philippines takes the spotlight, the question is not merely what books we will show but whose voices will be heard. Will we continue to parade the same English-language authors who already fit global expectations, or will we dare to present writers like Jalandoni who speak from the margins with unapologetic local color? Frankfurt does not need another English-speaking Filipino novelist. It needs a reason to listen to the languages we have long silenced.

To reclaim our literary identity, we must unlearn the colonial instinct that tells us English is our only key to the world. We must invest in translation that amplifies, not erases, that carries the provincial heartbeat into global ears without converting it into a foreign rhythm. Because every time we translate only to please, every time we rewrite ourselves for approval, we vanish a little more from our own story.

In the end, the tragedy of Philippine literature is not that the world ignores us. It is that we have preemptively ignored ourselves. We have mistaken translation for transformation, and in chasing recognition we have traded authenticity for fluency. If we continue this path, our languages will remain trapped in nostalgia, our writers confined to footnotes, and our future written in someone else’s words.

We translated ourselves out of existence. The challenge now is to translate ourselves back, not into English, but into being.