Translating pains via 'Anim na Sabado ng Beyblade'

John Leihmar Toledo lost his father in the first month of the pandemic. Because of the total lockdown, the writer-teacher was unable to say goodbye nor be present at the burial. Months later, he lost his teaching assignment. Then came rejections in his professional life.

Toledo, then 27, hit rock bottom. Caught in a series of weeks of limited movement replaced by weeks of total lockdown, he struggled against the sadness brought on by the losses and the news of deaths that came too frequently that year.

He turned to his library, rifling through his copy of Anim na Sabado ng Beyblade (Beyblade), a book by Ferdinand Pisigan Jarin. As a Creative Nonfiction teacher, he used the main essay in class and even drafted an English translation to help his students learn ideas organization better. Toledo decided to edit and finalize his translation of Beyblade.

“I thought that if I would die, I should have something to leave behind. I wrote with that intention,” Toledo says.  

In using literature to deal with grief, author Jarin and translator Toledo became one, albeit almost a decade apart.

Toledo and Jarin are long-time friends, moving in the same literary circle and in one writers' group.

"I listened to his (Jarin’s) lectures. I was influenced by his esthetics and his politics. What he believes in writing, I apply in my work," Toledo says.

Beyblade is a collection of 10 essays based on Jarin’s life — as a fatherless child raised by his mother and maternal relatives in Zambales and Manila; as a small schoolboy dealing with bullies in an enlisted men’s barrio in Makati; and as a young man juggling school, fast food restaurant work, girls, and early fatherhood.

Central to Jarin’s book is the essay about the short life of his son, Rebo Lean, who at the age of four, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

It was 2004. Children all over the world were enamored by the colorful, spinning, whizzing, lit tops that came out of Japan. It was Rebo’s favorite toy. Separated from his partner, Jarin made it a habit to visit Rebo every Saturday armed with a new beyblade.

“I was staring at Rebo’s beyblades on top of his casket on the third night of the wake when I decided to write about him,” Jarin recalls.

“Beyblade” painfully recounts Jarin’s journey from fatherhood to grief. It took him almost a decade to finish all the ten essays, busy as he was as a teacher. But along the way, three of the essays would win him a Carlos Palanca award, the country’s most prestigious honor for writers.

“My pace was one essay a year. It’s hard to write when it means exposing yourself,” he says.

By mid-2013, Visprint printed his book and sold all 2,000 copies before the year was out. A reprint was made in 2014.

Using light language and often self-deprecating and humorous, “Beyblade” became a required reading material for high school students. It won the National Book Award for Best Book of Nonfiction in Filipino in 2014 from the Manila Critics Circle and National Book Development Board. The UST Publishing House reprinted it recently.

While Jarin's book was on its way to becoming a hit, Toledo was working on his master’s degree in Malikhaing Pagsulat at the University of the Philippines (UP). One of his teachers urged him to “go back to Jarin” to learn how to properly organize his thoughts. It was the same book that would later take him out of his joyless days during the pandemic, living alone in a house in Quezon City.

Toledo translated “Beyblade” into English and offered it to Asymptote Journal in 2021. Based in Taiwan, Asymptote is an online literary magazine dedicated to world literature in translation. To his surprise, the magazine accepted his work.

From the beginning, Jarin was thrilled when Toledo informed him of the project.

“Asymptote is known as a translator’s nirvana,” Jarin explains.  

What followed was a series of back and forths over lines and paragraphs and phrases that taught Toledo the finer points of translation work. Asymptote published his translation in 2022.

Emboldened, Toledo approached Penguin Random South East Asia and pitched the idea of translating the whole book into English using “Beyblade” as a sample story. The project was greenlighted.

Toledo spent months on the project, teaching during the day and writing and editing during the night. And the rest, as they say, is history. “Beyblade” is now being sold on an international platform.

To Jarin, reading his book in English was surreal.

"Alam kong kuwento ko pa rin ito pero iba ang dating. Iyong sensibility, parang African novel. Parang iba na ang porma. May ibang insights na kasi iba na ang salita," Jarin says.

("It's my story but it reads differently now. The form has changed, the sensibility is akin to an African novel. The insights are different because the words have changed.")

Still, Jarin is ecstatic that his work is now accessible to English readers.

"I can't hold back the joy. It's humbling," Jarin says.

Writing the book helped Jarin face every memory that gave him grief; from the piercing pain that marked the hospital trips with his son and later, the finality of losing a son whose life has barely just begun.

“Nawala na ang manhid. Naharap ko na ang mga sakit sa dibdib pagkatapos kong maisulat. Wala nang denial,” he says.

("Writing it stripped me of the numbness. I finally faced the pain; I was no longer in denial.")

Jarin continues to write and teach while working on his doctorate.

Translating the book helped heal Toledo as well.

“When the pandemic hit, I almost gave up on being a writer. I had to go back to the story that made me realize I wanted to be a writer. It was quite therapeutic,’ he says.

He is back in the academe, teaching in two universities.

“I will continue to write — but now with a purpose,” he says. —JCB, GMA News