FOUR BOOKS AT THE PHILIPPINE BOOK FESTIVAL

THE Philippines' biggest book festival opened yesterday at the World Trade Center in Manila. Among its many publishers is Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, whose books are distributed in the Philippines by Alkem, with an online store at Acres Philippines.

I will have a book signing tomorrow, June 4, from 1 to 2 p.m. at the Booktopia section of the World Trade Center. I have four books for sale, and I got a lot of messages asking me how I finished four books in four years. Blame it largely on the Covid-19 pandemic.

I sent a revised version of my first novel, "Riverrun," to Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, and promptly forgot about it. I didn't even have a literary agent. This is the world's biggest trade publisher, I thought, and I'd be lucky to receive a reply (more likely, a rejection letter) after six months.

But Nora Nazerene Abu Bakar, the associate publisher at Penguin SEA, wrote to me on the next working day, saying she had read five chapters but had not yet made up her mind if she would buy the novel. After three months, she wrote back and made an offer to buy it and sell it in all territories (Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom and the rest of the world). I was so happy with the news that I just sat there, stunned in my chair, at my book-lined office at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia, where I served as head of School-English and full professor of creative writing.

And thus began my fruitful relationship with Penguin SEA. "Riverrun" was supposed to be launched in April 2020, and we had already lined up a series of book launches, including one at the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London, where I was supposed to attend an international conference. All those plans came tumbling down, slayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

"Riverrun" was printed in August 2020, but could not be sold outside Asia because of air freight issues brought about by the pandemic. Copies were only sold in Southeast Asia, and printed copies only reached the West in 2022.

But I never despaired. One day when I lived in Kuala Lumpur, Nora called me up to inquire if I would be interested in a three-book deal to translate three Tagalog masterpieces of the 20th century. These were "Banaag at Sikat," a 1906 novel by Lope K. Santos, "Mga Ibong Mandaragit" by the late National Artist Amado V. Hernandez and "Luha ng Buwaya," also by Hernandez.

I asked her why they had chosen me since there were other prose translators in the Philippines. She said they had done due diligence and research, and found out that my translations were modern and accessible — and the copies sold out!

Later, I signed a three-book deal with them. "Banaag at Sikat" was written in long, difficult and flowery prose, and its literary tradition was squarely set in the 19th century. The novel was didactic and sounded like a primer, thoroughly discursive in many parts. Its socialist ideas were repeated in several chapters, as if the then 26-year-old novelist wanted to make sure the reader got the "heavy message" of the novel.

I asked Nora's advice on what kind of translation she wanted, and she said "modern and accessible," like my earlier translations. After I received my marching orders, I translated "Banaag at Sikat"into "Radiance and Sunrise," using a late 20th-century British prose style. Bayani Santos, the grandson of Lope K. Santos, also a professor and publisher, lauded my translation and called it "lyrical and accessible." That thumb of approval mattered to me, more than that of a purist who ranted against me online for "redacting" parts of the novel. I read this critic's sample translation of a Filipino work: the English is correct but there is no euphony; the prose is turgid and constipated.

The novels of Hernandez were easier to translate, since they were written in the 1950s and 1960s, and Hernandez was a seasoned journalist as well. His Tagalog was brisk and breezy, and his socialist ideals were embodied in his novels' characters, dialogues and plot points.

My fourth book is "The Heart of Summer: Stories and Tales."It is a collection of short fiction on love, longing and loss written in the realist and fantastic modes.

A young boy and his sisters gather beautiful shells on the beach as mementos of a country they will leave behind. A girl who loves the Beatles sees dwarfs that are drawn charcoal-black on a white plate. A rich matron in Singapore discovers a primeval thing in her ritzy penthouse. A poor woman in the boondocks gives birth to a mudfish. Dead lovers buried beneath a hotel ruined by an earthquake reach out to each other. And a woman poisoned in Scotland centuries ago still haunts a hilltop castle, looking for her dead lover.

These and other characters inhabit my book of stories and tales. Some of the stories are written in the realistic mode. They poke fun at a colorful but violent dictatorship or track the same-sex love in a young man's heart. The others are written in the fantastic mode — fables, parables, origin tales, cheeky rewriting of rural lore and urban legends. The length of the stories also varies. Some are flash fiction, while the others have the sweep of a novella.

The stories are meant to entertain but also to instruct: why the present is just a re-looping of the past, why love remains constant and true even beyond death. Some of the stories were written in the last 30 years, while the others are of more recent vintage. They are moist with memory and melancholy, spiked with humor and hilarity.

It's my least literary novel, and I think my most entertaining. The readers seem to agree because "The Heart of Summer" is selling well in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, with many pre-orders in Thailand, the US and the UK.

Thus, I just kept on writing, even when people were dying like flies around me during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that was how I published four books in the past four years. See you at the Philippine Book Festival on June 2 to 4 at the World Trade Center.

2023-06-02T18:23:31Z dg43tfdfdgfd