Malansang Fish: Mistranslation and the Fact of Translation

Abstract

The article criticizes the failure to capture the Filipino sensibility in contemporary Philippine short stories in English, primarily using  the fiction pieces in Writing the Philippines, a special issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal in July 2018. With poets Ricardo M. De Ungria and Lawrence Lacambra Ypil as guest editors, it is one of the more recent collations of literary work that explicitly focus on the Philippines as location and on the local sensibility. The editorial, “The Pinoy Sensorium”, claims that the contributors were “attuned to their localities across different parts of the country.” There is a mistranslation, so to speak, with how some writers of English write the Filipino sensibility, a consequence that is attributable to the pitfalls of cultural translation and untranslatability, criticized by Brian James Baer for their shared ambivalence to what he calls “the fact of translation” (140). This fact of translation is similar to J. Neil Garcia’s recognition of the translated nature of Philippine literature in English. In contrast to Garcia’s  criticism against the realism of Philippine literature in English, the article argues that translation renders realist the English prose, when monolingual English, as purported by the Tiempos in New Criticism, is recalibrated for disrupting  multilingual and translational.