The burning passages of the novel on class and colonialism still resonate today. PHOTO BY PENGUIN BOOKS
The burning passages of the novel on class and colonialism still resonate today. PHOTO BY PENGUIN BOOKS

IT took me a year to translate the old Tagalog of Lope K. Santos in his 1906 novel, Banaag at Sikat, into 20th-century British English. The novel is a love story framed in the context of a political tale during the early days of American imperialism. Its burning passages on race, class and colonialism still resonate today. That must be one of the reasons why Penguin Random House Southeast Asia commissioned me to translate Santos' novel as the first Philippine title in its Southeast Asian Literary Classics series.

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