PENGUIN Random House Southeast Asia will soon publish my English translation of National Artist Amado V. Hernandez's novel, Mga Ibong Mandaragit. I gave the title The Preying Birds to my translation and retained the author's subtitle of 'a sociopolitical novel.'My translation is based on the 1969 edition of Mga Ibong Mandaragit, the publication of which was personally supervised by Hernandez. The book has become required reading in high school and college, and is still in print today.When I began translating this novel, I followed the principles that I employed when I translated Banaag at Sikat, the 1906 novel of Lope K. Santos, who was the teacher of Hernandez. My publisher's brief was to make a translation for the global readers of the 21st century.Therefore, I edited the repetitious lines and phrases that are found in the novel, especially in the latter parts. Please remember that Hernandez wrote the novel while he was in jail, serving a sentence for a charge of 'complex rebellion.' In this light, he was like Pramoedya Ananta Toer of Indonesia, who wrote the four novels of his Buru Quartet while incarcerated by another oppressive regime.Thus, Hernandez must have forgotten that he already described a character in an earlier chapter, a description that would be repeated later on in a latter chapter. His wife, Atang de la Rama Hernandez, also named a National Artist for Theater, smuggled out of jail the pieces of paper where Hernandez wrote the novel in longhand. I decided to cut the superfluous parts to ensure a smoother reading and to make the pages turn.Aside from being a novelist, Hernandez was also a journalist, which was both boon and bane. It was a boon because he employed the sometimes staccato style of writing the news and features in magazines, and this made for easier reading. He also had an eye for the human interest in the news.However, it was also a bane in the sense that he assumed that the readers already knew the background (economic, cultural, social and political) of the issues in the story. What I did was flesh out some details, adding a phrase here or there, that would clarify the expression of an idea.It was also clear in my mind that I was writing a translation that would try to approximate the way the characters spoke — if they had spoken in English. Thus, I avoided the wooden, textbook prose that passed for the translation of some 'classic' works of literature. I also used a brisk, late 20th-century prose style, which I thought would be appropriate for the readers of this translation.Moreover, I used the English equivalents of words ('jasmine' for sampaguita). I directly translated the words, phrases and sentences from Spanish to English. I also retained the 'pidgin English' used in the satirical chapter on the lawmakers debating in the smoke-filled Philippine Senate. Certainly, it was a sly allusion to what must have been one day in hell.In many cases, I have retained the names of places and proper names. I also retained the original spellings that the author used.I called my translation The Preying Birds because of the play of words. It is also an allusion to the novel, The Praying Mantis, by the late Bienvenido N. Santos who, like Hernandez, was also born in Tondo, Manila, the cradle of heroes. Coincidentally, Santos' novel was also banned by the Print Media Council in 1972, during the early days of Marcos Sr.'s martial law regime.I wrote this translation in the silence and solitude of the Covid-19 lockdowns in Kuala Lumpur and Quezon City. I could hear the ambulance sirens wailing around me and some people I knew were dropping dead like flies, but I kept on writing.The final revision and proofreading of this translation were done at the MacDowell Artists' Residency in New Hampshire, USA. I spent six weeks there with some of the world's best artists. The blue skies and the green trees, the astonishing atmosphere, made revising and proofreading this novel such a joy.As with my English translation of Banaag at Sikat, I would sometimes have vivid dreams about some of the scenes in Mga Ibong Mandaragit when I was writing the first draft in Cebu City. Even if I was, in the words of another wit, 'a mere translator,' I also lived inside the world of the novel I was working on.It also happened to me when I was writing the first draft of my book, Riverrun: A Novel, at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland many years ago. I guess you have to dream it first, so you can write it.World, please welcome Amado V. Hernandez, the Philippine National Artist for Literature.Email: danton.remoto@manilatimes.net
