Genevieve L. Asenjo's Lumbay ng Dila in Translation

Words by Mye Mulingtapang

In her conversation with Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta about The Melancholy of the Tongue, Asenjo highlights that it is about making a new space for connection. For authors whose works enter another language, the challenge is equally complex. Asenjo emphasized that translation involves more than vocabulary and grammar.

Explaining why she recommended novelist and translator Anna Margarita Nuñez for the project, Asenjo said a translator must also carry a work's sensibility, rhythm, and cultural texture into another language. For her, successful translation is not simply about accuracy but about recreating a reading experience for a new audience while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original.

“When I was given the opportunity by Fidessa to choose my translator or to recommend my translator I have really in mind Anna Margarita Nunez because she’s a colleague and a good friend who is a brilliant novelist herself who came out with her first novel

Hanaw about Iligan city in Mindanao. She has the competence both in Filipino and the English language and I believe she can translate or when we speak of translation it’s not only lexical right? You also translate sensibility, the rhythm, cultures,” said Asenjo.

Asenjo writes across Kinaray-a, Hiligaynon, and Filipino, making her work particularly relevant to conversations about translation and linguistic diversity in the Philippines.

She is featured in the Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Art (Literature, 2018). She has been awarded international writing fellowships, including residencies in Seoul, South Korea (2009), and at the International Writing Program (IWP) of the University of Iowa, USA (2012).

Asenjo’s work engages with urgent and enduring themes: inter-island migration and diaspora, the lives of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), women’s stories, indigenous knowledge systems, regional and postcolonial identities, and the environmental crises surrounding food security, rivers, water, and mountains. Her writing also contributes to the emerging Filipino Gothic or archipelagothic —a mode rooted in folklore, colonial trauma, and global hauntings.