Now it can be told because I have received the confirmation letter from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. I got a grant to translate six of my stories into Filipino. The six are:
1. Alot (Haircut). This is about coming home and finding out that everyone you knew has gone, except for your barber. An unexpected haircut becomes a metaphor for cutting off your relationship/s.
2. Ang Sastre (The Tailor). The village tailor dies, and everyone was waiting for his only son so they could bury him. But the whole village could only whisper their shock when the son arrives as a woman in red dress, with a bouquet of black paper roses.
3. Abyan (Friend). Three friends tell their own tale of a friendship that they didn't notice was falling apart.
4. Gugma sa Bangkok (Love in Bangkok). Exploring the labyrinth of a bath house in Bangkok, a traveler falls in love with a stranger, a Bangkok boy who buys him red roses from a Suan Plu market. No one has ever done that for him before.
5. Library. The school library opens. There is a program, with guests from the capital town. The school children perform for them, but only the teachers and guests are let inside the library for the reception. The excited school children peer from the wooden windows.
6. Imelda. Imelda buries her husband, who left her nothing but a small plot for vegetables. In the evening and she lies down on the bamboo floor, she listens to the chicken in their coop, and feels for the first time a sense of joy and freedom.
These stories shall be published next year in a bilingual edition. Stories 1-4 have been published in my book "Agi, agi may putay sa dahi" while stories 5 & 6 are new. Am excited to finish Binirayan 2010 and start on the translation.
