TUGKAD Volume 6
Introduction
Against Disappearance: Translating the Cebuano Literary Archive
Walter Benjamin reminds us that translation is far removed from “the sterile equation of two dead languages.”[1] It is an encounter between living traditions, each carrying its own history, habits of feeling, and ways of ordering experience. A literary work does not pass unchanged into another language. It acquires a second life, marked by the choices of the translator and by the expectations of its new readers.
For Cebuano literature, this second life is particularly important. Cebuano is spoken by millions and possesses a long, varied tradition of poetry, drama, fiction, journalism, and oral narrative. Yet much of this writing remains difficult to obtain outside the places where it first appeared. Many works were published in newspapers and magazines, circulated among regional readers, and then allowed to disappear into libraries, private collections, and deteriorating files. Their limited visibility in English has sometimes been mistaken for an absence of literary production. The problem has never been that Cebuano writers had little to say. The problem is that their work has not travelled far enough.
This special issue is one attempt to extend that journey. The translations assembled here are not offered as a comprehensive survey. They are a selection of works from different periods and literary environments, brought together by their engagement with the forces that shape ordinary life: family, marriage, religion, poverty, law, political authority, sexual desire, communal memory, and the unequal exercise of power. They move between provincial towns and city streets, churches and marketplaces, courtrooms and school grounds, domestic interiors and open seas.
What emerges is not a unified Cebuano sensibility. These writers disagree with one another about virtue, desire, freedom, faith, and social obligation. Some rely upon melodrama; others employ allegory, satire, psychological realism, or the marvellous. Some speak in the elevated language of moral instruction; others draw their energy from gossip, comic exaggeration, and the speech of the street. Their differences prevent “Cebuano literature” from becoming a convenient regional abstraction. It is better understood as a continuing conversation among writers responding to distinct historical pressures.
Several stories examine the disturbing proximity between public authority and private wrongdoing. In Marcel Navarra’s “The Sun Is High,” translated by Mel Francis Amadora, the corruption of Serafin Arguelo, a police chief, returns to him in the form of a nightmare. Bribery, smuggling, adultery, and indifference to the poor belong to the same moral economy. Serafin sees large fish devouring smaller ones and, finally, a serpent swallowing whatever crosses its path. The imagery is hardly subtle, nor is it meant to be. Power has become appetite. When Serafin wakes to find that the sun is already high, he has entered daylight without necessarily escaping the darkness that produced the dream.
Rev. Fernando Buyser’s “The Priest and the Town,” translated by Joshua Carillo, reduces a dispute over religious authority to the spare terms of allegory. The priest claims to represent God; the town declares itself king and insists that its voice is the voice of God. Pride brings them to the edge of separation. Reconciliation becomes possible only when the abstract figure of “the Town” gives way to the people themselves, who grieve, repent, and ask the priest to remain. The story is devotional, but it is also alert to the dangers of collective rhetoric. Those who speak in the name of the people do not always speak for them.
In Maria Kabigon’s “Beyond Reclaim,” translated by RJ Loquias, the law becomes an instrument of irreversible injustice. Daniel is found holding a murder weapon and is condemned despite his protestations of innocence. Tomas, a wealthy rival who desires Daniel’s fiancée, possesses the influence to make accusation appear as fact. The truth is discovered only after Daniel has been executed. The story uses the machinery of melodrama without apology: the innocent lover, the corrupt rival, the concealed crime, and the confession that comes too late. Its moral argument depends upon that lateness. Justice delayed does not become justice when the dead cannot be recalled.
Vicente Rama’s “Amboy, the Drunkard,” translated by Lea Gein Cabrera, looks instead at the daily violence of poverty. Amboy works hard but drinks away his wages, leaving his wife and children to survive through hunger, casual labor, and humiliation. The narrative condemns his drunkenness, yet it does not isolate vice from the economy that sustains it. Vendors profit from his weakness, his children labor in Carbon Market, and the municipal jail stands ready to receive him. When his sons later organize a campaign against alcohol and publish a reformist newspaper, private grief acquires a public language. Their response is moralistic, but it is also political. They seek to change the conditions that made their childhood possible.
These stories often employ strong emotion as a means of social judgment. Tears, remorse, shame, sacrifice, and jealousy are not simply signs of sentimental excess. They reveal the distribution of power within the family and the community. They show who is permitted to choose, who is expected to forgive, and who must bear the consequences of another person’s freedom.
In Gardeopatra Quijano’s “On the Brink of Death,” translated by Bhon Glory Jayn Cabilete, Fred marries Fe without loving her. No one forces him. He is carried into the marriage by family expectation, gossip, vanity, and his unwillingness to speak honestly. Fe understands the failure of their marriage before he does. Her offer to release him is an act of clarity rather than surrender. Only when she appears likely to die does Fred begin to recognize the difference between receiving devotion and returning it. The conclusion restores the marriage, but the restoration is shadowed by the knowledge that truth arrived dangerously late.
Sulpicio Osorio’s “Unfeeling” translated by Arcturus Jerome Gonzales, treats a similar imbalance through comedy. Butoy excuses his infidelity by presenting himself as a charitable “healer” of lonely women. His wife, Imak, initially answers him with patience, tears, and appeals to religious duty. With the help of her friend Busyang, however, she adopts his own argument and claims the same freedom for herself. Butoy immediately discovers principles that had escaped him while he was unfaithful. Imak’s deception may be comic, but its purpose is exact. She translates her suffering into an experience her husband can no longer dismiss.
Luz, the central figure of Maria Kabigon’s “The Poet,” translated by Lamuel Daan, faces another form of masculine presumption. Three friends decide by raffle which of them will be allowed to court her. Luz rejects the arrangement, insisting that they remain free to pursue her. More significantly, she insists upon her own freedom to judge them. Their courtship reveals their characters. Manuel responds with aggression, Jose with vanity, and Paule with restraint. Luz’s choice of the poor poet turns romance into a test of conduct rather than wealth. The story retains the idealized language of its period, but it allows an educated woman to refuse the terms upon which men have attempted to distribute her affection.
Sulpicio Osorio’s “A Man’s Soul,” translated by Gian Marcko Capitan, is less certain about the moral demands of love. Rudolfo loves Flora; Nitay loves Rudolfo and becomes the confidante who helps him secure Flora. Nitay’s renunciation is praised as noble, while Rudolfo’s continuing emotional attachment to her is described as one of the wanderings of a man’s soul. The imbalance is revealing. The woman gives up her desire; the man is permitted an inward freedom that survives marriage. The story should not be made to express contemporary views it does not possess. Its value lies partly in preserving an earlier, gendered account of fidelity and emotional privilege.
In Agustin Pagusara’s “A Sonata in Mrs. Corda’s Heart,” translated by Mary Louise Raboy, female desire is neither sacrificial nor safely idealized. A stranger’s gaze on a jeepney awakens in Mrs. Corda an erotic restlessness that unsettles her sense of herself as a married woman. The story follows her physical responses with unusual directness. Yet the anticipated encounter eventually folds back into the marriage bed, where the desired stranger becomes indistinguishable from her husband. The ending may contain the threat of adultery, but it does not cancel the desire that produced it. Fantasy returns to the household and, in doing so, gives the familiar body a new intensity.
These works offer no single image of Cebuano womanhood. Women are idealized, deceived, disciplined, courted, abandoned, and endangered. They also choose, judge, scheme, desire, and refuse. Their agency often works from within the moral conventions that restrict them. This does not make that agency insignificant. It shows how freedom is negotiated when complete freedom is unavailable.
Carmelo Lariosa’s “When the String Broke One Afternoon,” translated by Alyssa Kate Angalot, moves into the world of students, drinking, popular music, and hesitant courtship. Itok, an orphan and gifted guitarist, loves Carmencita but cannot speak to her with confidence. His friend Mel sings on his behalf and gradually becomes the object of Carmencita’s attention. The broken guitar string condenses the story’s emotional movement into a single image: music interrupted, friendship strained, and love rendered inexpressible. After Itok disappears, no explanation entirely satisfies. Rumor, guilt, memory, and song turn him into a figure suspended between death and local legend.
Communal storytelling assumes an even larger role in Omar Khalid’s “The Sunbird Child,” translated by Jason Brendon Yntig. The inhabitants of Gairan believe in Inday Sinsin, a girl whose body bears the feathers of a sunbird. Around her gather priests, doctors, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, and government officials, each eager to provide the authoritative explanation. She is called a miracle, a demon, a medical anomaly, a scientific opportunity, and a possible tourist attraction.
The story’s humor arises from the confidence of these competing interpreters. Modern institutions prove no less capable of fantasy than the villagers. Scientific fame, international recognition, religious authority, municipal progress, and commercial development become forms of belief. Inday Sinsin’s escape from confinement is therefore an escape from interpretation itself. She leaves behind those who would explain, exhibit, condemn, or profit from her.
The sea remains close to many of these narratives. It is a source of food and work, but also a space of departure, danger, loss, and uncertain return. It receives the missing, carries travelers away, and preserves the possibility that death has not yet been proved. The sea is both geography and narrative method. It allows absence to remain unresolved.
This maritime imagination reaches its fullest expression in Hope Yu’s translation of the excerpt from Angel Enemecio’s novel, Gall of Sorrow. Rosas Pangdan and Rafael pass through vows, misunderstandings, political intrigue, imprisonment, attempted suicide, shipwreck, presumed death, rescue, reunion, and renewed separation. The scale is deliberately expansive. Bells mourn, winds speak, skies darken, and the sea alternately divides, threatens, and delivers the lovers.
Such emotional abundance belongs to the work’s form. It would be a mistake to treat it simply as excess requiring modern restraint. In Gall of Sorrow, feeling enters the landscape. Private anguish spreads into churches, prisons, roads, political gatherings, ships, and islands. The individual life cannot be separated from family authority, social rank, religious belief, newspaper publicity, and political ambition.
The suffering of Rosas Pangdan and Rafael is not evenly distributed. Rafael can travel, change his name, enter politics, speak publicly, and search for the woman he has lost. Rosas is more frequently confined, threatened, misread, or acted upon. Both suffer, but they do not possess the same means of responding to suffering. The distinction gives the romance its social weight.
The works in this issue belong to different moments, yet they do not arrange themselves into a simple movement from the traditional to the modern. Devotional allegory coexists with political satire. Melodrama becomes a vehicle for examining law, class, and gender. Folkloric narrative absorbs television, social media, government bureaucracy, and commercial development. Newspapers may circulate falsehood, expose wrongdoing, or organize reform. New institutions enter the stories, but older structures of feeling remain.
Translation makes these continuities and disruptions available to a wider readership. It also risks concealing them. The English versions collected here do not always move with the same degree of ease. Some seek the rhythms of contemporary English; others remain close to Cebuano syntax, repetition, exclamation, and rhetorical address. Such differences call for editorial attention, but they should not automatically be treated as defects. A perfectly smooth English sentence may erase the historical strangeness of the original. It may also conceal the translator’s struggle with forms of address, kinship, belief, humour, and social hierarchy for which English supplies no exact equivalent.
Terms such as tuba, puso, kumare, Noy, and Bathala cannot be reduced to local decoration. They belong to material and social worlds. They identify what people drink and eat, how they address one another, how relationships are organized, and how the sacred is named. To remove them in the name of fluency would make the stories easier to read while making their worlds less distinct.
There is no final rule that settles the argument between fidelity and readability. The translator decides repeatedly what must be preserved, what may be altered, and what requires explanation. Fidelity may reside in narrative pace rather than syntax, in moral tone rather than literal phrasing, or in the preservation of historical distance rather than surface awkwardness. Each work demands its own arrangement of loyalties.
The translators represented in this issue, Mel Francis Amadora, Alyssa Kate Angalot, Joshua Carillo, Lamuel Daan, Bhon Glory Jayn Cabilete, Arcturus Jerome Gonzales, RJ Loquias, Mary Louise Raboy, Gian Marcko Capitan, Jason Brendon Yntig, Lea Gein Cabrera, and Hope Yu, are therefore not invisible carriers of meaning. They are readers and interpreters. Their decisions about rhythm, vocabulary, naming, explanation, and cultural reference have become part of the continuing history of these works.
English is not the final destination of Cebuano literature. It is one more place in which the literature may live. Translation can bring these texts into classrooms, journals, comparative studies, and conversations with other Philippine and Southeast Asian traditions. It can enlarge their readership and return neglected writers to critical attention. It cannot replace the language in which the works first took form. The Cebuano texts remain primary. Their translations enlarge their circulation while bearing witness to the distance crossed.
This special issue is therefore both an offering and an invitation. It offers a selection of works that deserve to be read beyond the accidents of geography, language policy, and publishing history. It invites readers to approach them not as regional curiosities or cultural evidence alone, but as literature: varied in form, implicated in history, alive to contradiction, and often more unsettling than their moral surfaces first suggest.
The characters gathered here leave towns, enter marriages, cross seas, approach death, awaken from dreams, disappear into rumor, and return under altered names. Their stories have travelled as well. They arrive in English changed, but not emptied of their former lives. That difficult interval, between what remains and what has been remade, is where translation begins.
Hope Sabanpan-Yu, Ph.D.
Editor
July 2026
[1] Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. 69–82. 73.
Contributors
Mel Francis B. Amadora is a graduate from the Bachelor of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies with Creative Writing program at the University of San Carlos. In 2023, he was the pioneering Creative Director of HALANGDON, the student publication of the Department of Communications, Linguistics, and Literature. He participated in the University of San Carlos’ 10th University Research Conference and received a Best Oral Presenter Award for his and Bhon Glory Jayn Cabilete’s paper titled “Queer spaces of the Philippine home in children’s picture books.”
Alyssa Kate A. Angalot is a graduate of Bachelor of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies with Creative Writing at the University of San Carlos, Cebu. Charmed by the art of words, she became an article writer for her high school journalism club, AdC Nouvelle. She also wrote haikus in 2022 for “Homeward," an anthology co-produced by fellow literature classmates.
Gian Marcko Capitan is a graduate of Bachelor of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies with Creative Writing at the University of San Carlos, Cebu. He was appointed president of the department’s main student organization, Societatis Lingua Artes (SOLARES).
Joshua P. Carillo graduated from the BA Literary and Cultural Studies in Creative Writing of the University of San Carlos and is an aspiring writer. He, along with his classmates, published a chapbook in 2022 titled Homeward, and is writing a book incorporating Filipino mythology with real-world elements. During his time in the university, he was appointed Treasurer and External Secretary in their department’s student organizations: Pulong sa Alagad sa Obra (PALABRA) and Societatis Lingua Artes (SOLARES), respectively.
Bhon Glory Jayn P. Cabilete is a graduate of Bachelor of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies with Creative Writing from the University of San Carlos. An accomplished student scholar, she presented her work at the University Research Conference 2026 and won the Outstanding Paper Presentation Award at the 1st International and 3rd National Language and Literature Undergraduate Research Conference.
Lamuel N. Daan is a graduate from the Bachelor of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of San Carlos. In 2023, he served as one of the original writers of HALANGDON, the student publication of the Department of Communications, Linguistics and Literature. He aims to contribute to the preservation and promotion of Philippine literary traditions.
Arcturus Jerome B. Gonzales is graduated from the Bachelor of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies in Creative Writing in USC. In the entirety of his time as a student of BA-LCS he has co-authored the poetry collection titled Homeward alongside his classmates. He won first place in the CCS 2023 Creative-Nonfiction Writing. He also served as the very first Editor-in-Chief of HALANGDON, the official student publication of the Department of Communications, Linguistics and Literature, from 2023 until 2024.
Ron Jeric Loquias graduated BA Literature at the University of San Carlos and aspires to be a fiction writer who also dabbles in poetry. He also desires to be a translator and continue research on Cebuano Literature.
Mary Louise F. Raboy is a graduate of BA Literary and Cultural Studies with Creative Writing. In 2018, she won an award for Collaborative Desktop Publishing at the Cebu City Division’s Schools Press Conference (DSPC), and served as editor-in-chief for the yearbook, Semper Paratus, and the publication, Semper Vera. She trained in campus broadcasting and Oxford-Oregon debate.
Jason Brendon Yntig is a graduate of Bachelor of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies with Creative Writing at the University of San Carlos, Cebu. He was a member of their department’s student organizations, Pulong sa Alagad sa Obra (PALABRA) and Societatis Lingua Artes (SOLARES).
Lea Gein Cabrera is a graduate of the English Language Studies program at the University of San Carlos. As a language enthusiast, her passion lies in translation, and enjoys applying all its different theories in her translation works.
Hope S. Yu is a short-story writer, poet and creative non-fictionist. She writes in Cebuano and English. She is currently Director of the Cebuano Studies Center of the University of San Carlos where she also teaches literature. She is a comparatist and works part time in translation.