decomp journal zine #3

Translate Me Not:

New Filipin/x Writing and Art

Letter from the Editors

What do we translate? When do we translate? Should we translate and what are we trying to pursue in translation? "Translate Me Not: New Filipin/x Writing and Art," is a zine curated by Filipin/x Editors, featuring works that engage with translation–in terms of and beyond language–to recognize what gets lost or illuminated in translation across the Filipin/x diaspora. As a team of academics, writers, and creatives, we wanted to think expansively beyond the frameworks we’ve settled into when thinking through our experiences in the Filipin/x diaspora here on stolen Indigenous lands. We found that language and translation was our entry point for doing this work.

Why language and translation?

We often find ourselves caught in acts of translation that express a desire to not just be heard but to be understood. And when we feel like our identities are unheard, we reach for poetic tropes: mangoes and oceans or the country as Maria Clara. These tropes have been our starting points but they should continually evolve to ripple outwards–whether we are fixed to or dispersed from our home. Our title for decomp’s third zine “Translate Me Not” conveys our search for a space to make and publish languages that wrestle with identity on new terms and in new directions.

What does mis/un/translation do for us?

We as an editorial team all tether differently to our Filipin/x identities, to where translation takes many forms and ends for us. Mastery of a language should not define our ability to participate in and do the work of translating our experiences. We choose to reimagine mistranslation as the questioning or even active refusal of the need to translate ourselves. Translation away from English or Spanish does not promise a straightforward disentanglement towards capturing a “pre-colonial” past. We are not interested in finding what is “lost” in translation. We are open to dwelling in this space and seeing what new terms might grow within it. We see the desire to suspend both poetic and artistic language as a reflection of our anxieties around migration, colonialism and borders. The term “Filipin/x” maintains the gap of (mis)translation that occurs in our communities, familial and otherwise. It inspires the reinterpretation of proximities, distances, and legibilities to ourselves and to each other.

Many of the submissions we received illuminated new forms of Filipin/x mistranslation. The ones we chose invite us to think of new dialects and internal grammars for the Filipin/x experience.

“Tomato Soup for the Soul” by Julia Escaño gifted us with tomatoes when we expected mangoes.

How long did it take them to grow brave? I’m still feeling out/ my place in things. Can I belong in this new ground when it seems so/ unfamiliar?

Julia’s work speaks to how we don’t need to fully have our bearings. If fluency is like having your bearings in a language, then we don’t need to wait for fluency in order to start feeling our way around.

Marc Perez’s “Displacements” strives towards translating the relationship between Filipin/x diasporic communities and place.

“Home feels transient like Vancouver weather. Phone in hand, I scroll my free time away and come across a social media post about gentrification in Joyce-Collingwood. I click the link to an article. A multinational company, it reports, has applied for a rezoning application to develop the area, which the city deems commercially weak...The establishments are not closing anytime soon, but as the clouds dissipate and the sky clears up, I feel a sudden urge to share some Filipino food with Nanay who still lives in the neighbourhood.”

Our melancholy about the changing of place can be a productive place to attend tot the complicated desire to feel rooted as diasporic folks. Should we ever feel rooted in a community placed on stolen lands?

“Dear Instagram pronouns” by Candice Joy Oliva plays with our discomfort around un/translatability in reclaiming and unsettling languages of identification on the speaker’s own terms.

alam ko: you could call me she/they, / and maybe someday / they / will sit better. / but for now, siya sits—

We are thankful to have received submissions that actively disrupt, confront, and question the binaries by which language and translation exist within. Pushing against such definitions of ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’, we invite readers to engage with the works that we’ve selected for this zine as re-imagined forms of mis/translation.

From the “Translate Me Not” Editorial Team

Olivia Lim, Alyssa Sy de Jesus, Hannah Balba, Hannah Pabuaya Rubia, Jacqueline Sarvini, Moses Caliboso, Phebe M. Ferrer, Raphael Diangkinay, Steffi Tady

decomp journal zine #3

Translate Me Not:

New Filipin/x Writing and Art

Letter from the Editors

Contents

Poems

Short Fiction

Creative Nonfiction

Mixed Media & Art

decomp.