MISSING tombs and found readers are just two of the many concerns that the writer-delegates to the 2nd Bikol Book Festival had to contend with. The weeklong and more celebration of writing and reading began with a tribute to an educator, with some of the ceremonies bringing the writers and the representatives of the National Book Development Board to cemeteries or memorial sites.
But there is another issue writers as well educators had to face and this has to do with statistics on reading and literacy. Following the study of Unicef, less than 15 percent of schoolchildren in the country can read simple texts. The study cites the school closure during the pandemic as the reason for this dismal showing. The latest Unicef assessment also mentions the learning poverty rate registering more than 85 percent, a phenomenon described further as the proportion of 10-year-olds who cannot read simple stories. This reading ability connotes understanding skill as well.
The pandemic framing of the sad numbers reflected by those reports softened the realities about us as an archipelago of readers or, in this case, non-readers. From hereon, it is easier to extrapolate how we are in daily lives, demonstrate our abilities to think and, thereby, make decisions. From hereon, a celebration about reading and, backtracking, writing takes on a quixotic, idealistic tone, but not necessarily a hopeless exercise.
Without meaning to, we ourselves in this movement behind book festivals are really no more like teachers than warriors braving fields to where we bring our ideas and ideals about reading literatures.
The celebration entails book donations. Very simple enough: you want people to read, then give books to people to read. You want young people to read, then provide these young people materials to read. You want children to know what books are and what splendid worlds they can visit and experience, then study what good things these children should read. And produce those books appropriate for their ages or compelling enough to make them like reading. The NBDB Book Nook, one of its flagship projects, aims to bring books authored by Filipino writers to places or locations not usually serviced by publishing houses or bookstores.
In the second book festival, Bikol edition, there are writers and publishers who grapple with materials if only to shape them for children, in particular. Ani Almario, for example, the educator and woman behind Adarna House, the pioneering children’s book publishing house, is so specific with her vision, opting to talk about the dark age of reading during the lockdown brought on by Covid-19.
If reading is here, can languages be far behind? Or the problem of languages?
The Bikol Book Festival deals with languages by way of the trope of a journey. The writers almost like itinerant storytellers travel the length (limited as this is at present) to tell the tales of those who also deal with the virtues of languages. And what are the virtues of languages but in the enchantment of bringing them into a relationship with other languages through translations. Two of our noted translators are gracing the festival: the multiawarded poet Marne Kilates and Danton Remoto, who, outside of his achievements in literature, is known for his advocacies under the LGBTQIA+. They share their multiple experiences with “dakit-taramon” (lit. transfer of speech) as they persist to look into languages, imagined and reimagined.
Translation must not remain on the level of thinking. The festival will highlight books in different languages and books translated from English to other Philippine languages. Delfin Fresnosa, the Sorsoganon whose grave was found in time for last year’s tribute to him, will be in the spotlight again as his stories are translated from their original English to Filipino and Bikol. Fresnosa’s translators—or interlocutors—are Jun Dio, a lawyer and filmmaker, and Juan Escandor, an accomplished journalist. Both are Sorsoganons.
The art and discipline of translation dovetails into histories of words and languages. An important work is launched during the festival. This is the dictionary well known to scholars of Bikol societies and cultures, Marcos de Lisboa’s Vocabulario de la Lengua Bicol, monumental in many ways—from its physical heft to the generational efforts put into the production of said work. Evelyn Caldera Soriano, a descendant of the Arejola patriots of the 19th century revolution, worked on what her mother Leticia had started, which is an English translation of the dictionary in which survives those words long before colonization had altered many of the concepts.
Reading (and writing) of course, with its problems and possibilities, does not exist in a vacuum. Economics and technologies, among many other factors, have effects on those human activities. Nick Pichay, another lawyer in this year’s team of writers, talks about copyright, social media, ethics, and writer’s unions. These are elements that counter the freedom that we attribute to the development of arts and literatures. Roland Tolentino, a former dean and a prolific writer whose writings are always at the cusp of the upheavals in all kinds of communities, has been tasked to address the issues of literature and artificial intelligence.
As in the first Bikol Book Festival, the act of reading has always been linked inextricably to the traditions of producing the materials to be read. Writers who have pioneered literary movements either in the person of a bishop, Msgr. Teotimo Pacis, who managed the translation of the Bible and the Roman Catholic Missal, or in the scholarship of Ma. Lilia F. Realubit, whose mission it was to recover the unheralded materials from the peripheries, are remembered and paid homage to. n