"TRANSLATION AS THE MONSTER IN THE MIRROR" by RALPH SEMINO GALAN

 Translation as the Monster in the Mirror

By Ralph Semino Galán

There is something monstrous about Remedios Varo’s “The Lovers,” the painting that inspired Mga Bubuyog na Nagkumpulan, a cycle of short stories by Chuckberry J. Pascual: a pair of lovers, with hand mirrors for faces, stare at each other at an oblique angle, as they sit on a park bench, while floodwaters rise under the pouring rain. In a sense, literature and its translation can be seen as incarnations of these lovers, the way they refract, rather than reflect, each other, due to the unique slant of any translation in relation to the original text. This has something to do with the fact that no two languages have a one-to-one correspondence in terms of vocabulary lists and their concomitant denotative and connotative meanings. As a literary translator, one therefore has to pursue each sentence or line, not necessarily word for word, but idiom for idiom, to come up with a competent, if not excellent, translation.

Remedios Varo’s “The Lovers”

And there is something predatory too about the translation process, the way the translator, like a vampire, sucks the lifeblood of the original text, and then duplicates it by regurgitating it in another tongue. But before the fatal bite or blow can be delivered, the translator has to stalk the words and phrases of the author in the dark streets of the source language, like Jack the Ripper, or to use the reverse allusion, like Theseus tracing the trail of the minotaur inside intricate passages to the heart of the labyrinth to slay it. Interestingly, the name of the minotaur is Asterion, the Greek word for star, whose coruscation this translator interprets as that particular eureka moment when the corresponding word or turn of phrase is discovered.

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s “In Praise of Echo,” translation is described as “a controversial literary form” which is often dismissed as “a ‘mere echo’ of the original—that too much has been lost in the process of traveling from one language into another.” Translation’s inferiority as an amorphous genre is further exacerbated by the fact that, like Echo, the translator has always been seen as capable only of repeating certain parts of the original.

Nevertheless, what this translator tries to accomplish in his mimesis through another tongue is the creation of a literary double, a doppelgänger of sorts. And like Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection, or Echo falling in love with Narcissus, this translator must first and foremost be enamored of the text he is translating, to come up with a more-or-less successful translation, which in the end will reverberate not only with the author’s voice, but also his own. Since according to Lahiri: “There is no better or more satisfying way to satisfy one’s love for a text than to translate it. To translate a book is to enter into a relationship with it, to approach and accompany it, to know it intimately, word by word, and to enjoy the comfort of its company in return.”

And finally, when reading a horror story or novel in translation, the reader, ideal or not, is also aware, consciously or subconsciously, that the reflection of the monster in the mirror of his or her or zir imagination might not exactly be the same as the monster in the source language—the demon or deviant, freak or fright, bugaboo or bogeyman inside the original author’s mind.

Ralph Semino Galán

June 1, 2025

Cubao, Quezon City 

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Ralph Semino Galán is a trilingual prize-winning poet and translator, a literary and cultural critic, and editor. He is the Assistant Director of the UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies, and an Associate Professor of Literature, the Humanities and Creative Writing in the UST Faculty of Arts and Letters. He is the author of the following books: The Southern Cross and Other Poems (UBOD New Authors Series, NCCA, 2005), Discernments: Literary Essays, Cultural Critiques and Book Reviews (UST Publishing House, 2013), From the Major Arcana [poems] (USTPH, 2014), Sa mga Pagitan ng Buhay at Iba pang Pagtutulay[poetry translations] (USTPH, 2018), and The Gathering Bees (English translation from the Filipino of Chuckberry J. Pascual’s Mga Bubuyog na Nagkumpulan). He is currently working on a research project sponsored by the UST Research Center for Culture, Arts and Humanities titled “Labaw sa Bulawan: Translating 300 Mindanao Poems from Cebuano into English (1930-2020).”