Language: Bikolano

To Become an Afterlife: An Interview with Christian Jil Benitez on Filipino Literature in Translation

December 3, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

After all, with all the languages and cultures of the country, one can only speak of the ‘Philippine’ in partials. . .

Named Poet of the Year in 2018 by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language), Christian Jil Benitez is a queer Filipino poet, scholar, and translator. His debut book, Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (A Theory of Time, 2022), was awarded the Best Book of Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies at the National Book Awards in the Philippines, substantiating his important work in codifying the cultural formation of ‘Filipino time’ via the material, the poetic, and the tropical, in addition to finding an equilibrium between Western critical theory and indigenous epistemologies.

Beyond his scholarship, from positioning the bugtong (or the Tagalog riddle) as ecopoetry to recasting vernacular oral traditions as matrices of queer world-making, Benitez’s translations maintain that their critical role is not merely linguistic, but also results in a creative rebirth, of ‘translation that acknowledges, and relishes even, the transfiguration of the material as it is carried over from one containing language to another’.

In this conversation, I spoke with Dr. Benitez, traversing Bangkok and Manila, about the pressures and prospects of translation in neocolonial, multilingual Philippines, as well as the ethics of barkadahan, especially when familiarity and friendship become central to the labour and logics of literary translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your debut, Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (A Theory of Time), excavates the construct of time through Philippine-language dictionaries, poetry, historico-colonial texts, metaphors, and indigenous orality, revealing it as ecological, discursive, and material. How does ‘Filipino time’, as you’ve theorised it, diverge from Western, capitalist temporality?

Christian Jil Benitez (CJB): We commonly use ‘Filipino time’ to refer to the tendency of Filipinos to be late: to start an event in ‘Filipino time’ means to actually start one hour after the initially agreed time. The term was supposedly coined by the Americans during their occupation in the country to shame Filipinos for this behavior, but this habit has also been observed in many Southeast Asian (as well as other non-Eurowestern) contexts, and can be understood as the persistence of polychronic sensibility in these cultures despite the imposition of Eurowestern, capitalist, and patriarchal monochronicity. READ MORE…

Complex Entanglements: A Review of Arasahas by Jaya Jacobo

February 17, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Lian Sing

Arasahas shows us not just how to hold multiple truths at once, but also how to embrace uncertainty. . .

Arasahas by Jaya Jacobo, translated from the Filipino by Christian Jil Benitez, PAWA Press in association with Paloma Press, 2024

My initial encounter with Jaya Jacobo’s Arasahas (Savage Mind Books, 2023) was primal. The title, a Bikolano word deliberately left unchanged by Christian Jil Benitez in his debut translation with PAWA Press, depicts a sensory experience; roughly translated from one of nearly two hundred languages in the Philippines, arasahas describes the warm, humid weather central to life in the tropics. My skin tingles when I read the word, and I recall the inescapable, invisible stickiness that life in the Philippines is steeped in. To the English reader, the word arasahas hisses, sizzles—even without its meaning, its sound, by virtue of the repeating a and s, coils and lingers in the ear. It clings.

A sharp poetic decision by both author and translator, the title invites the reader back into their body, and it is from the body that we approach the text. This is vital, because Arasahas is a collection that dances around what is almost, if not absolutely, unnamable but deeply palpable. It is a book of vivid, concrete images—a perfume bottle breaking, a bird’s nest delicacy, the tugging of “something within”—to allude not just to the abstract, but also the spiritual. In these acts of gesturing is the sense that there is something more, be it the supernatural or divine, that seeps into and transforms the everyday. I am reminded of how humidity, the invisible but ever-present water in the air, is fundamental to the proliferation of life. Similarly, Jacobo’s allusions and references perforate the text, and within these chasms are the hints at meaning that Arasahas alchemizes. Boundaries are challenged; left porous. In Arasahas, this simultaneity of meaning is not mere technique, but a sensibility formed by the lived experience of the poet. READ MORE…