The Flower of Heidelberg

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.24.2.2025.4140

Keywords:

dystopian future, tropical futurism, Philippine fiction in translation, José Rizal

Abstract

Set in the year 2577, this short story imagines a dystopic future where all languages—except for five from the imperial temperate world—have been almost wiped out by five homogenous global capitalist entities, each known as Corporation (according to each corporation’s home language). In this bleak future, linguists exist not as scholars but as peddlers of languages, particularly endangered ones, including the various Filipino vernaculars. The lives of linguists are made precarious by the Corporation, with its clear intention to monopolize power over human communication by homogenizing language, making the marginal ones, along with their peddlers, extinct. The short story unfolds as a diary entry of an unnamed linguist of Tagalog, a Filipino vernacular, as they ruminate on the 1886 poem “A las flores del Heidelberg” by the Filipino patriot José Rizal. After receiving an offer from the German Koerperschaft, which they cannot refuse, the linguist attempts to imagine a way through the hegemony, even if it takes the bending of time itself. Accompanying the story is a short translator’s note which contextualizes the translation process, and draws a preliminary parallel between the narrative translated and the practice of translation itself in the midst of the turbulent present.

Author Biographies

Alvin B. Yapan, Ateneo de Manila University, The Philippines

Alvin B. Yapan is a writer, educator, and filmmaker. His short stories and novels have won critical praise from Palanca Awards, the Philippine National Book Award, and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Writers’ Prize. His first novel in the vernacular, Ang Sandali ng mga Mata (Time of the Eye, 2006), and his collection of short stories, Sangkatauhan Sangkahayupan (Humanity Bestiary, 2017), both received the Philippine National Book Award. He was a fellow at the 2022 Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) of Sing Lit Station (SLS) and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University. With a doctoral degree in Philippine Studies, his research interests include the epic genre, folk aesthetics, and literature in the vernacular. He also finds time to produce and direct films in the middle of his teaching commitments at the Department of Filipino, Ateneo de Manila University. His works, both in fiction and film, delve into the uncanny aspects of contemporary encounters with the non- and post-human.

Christian Jil Benitez (Trans.), Chulalongkorn University, Thailand & Ateneo de Manila University, The Philippines

Christian Jil R. Benitez is a Filipino scholar, poet, and translator. He is currently pursuing his PhD in comparative literature at Chulalongkorn University. He teaches at the Ateneo de Manila University, in the Philippines, where he earned his AB-MA in Filipino literature. His critical and creative works have appeared in various journals and anthologies, the most recent of which include the eTropics double special issue “Queering the Tropics” (2024), the edited volume Poetry and the Global Climate Crisis (Routledge, 2023), and the Manoa special issue “Here was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting (2024). His first book Isang Dalumat  ng  Panahon (A Theory of Time, ADMU  Press, 2022) received the Philippine National Book Award for literary criticism and cultural studies. His English translation of Arasahas: Poems from the Tropics was published by PAWA Press and Paloma Press.

References

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Yapan, A. B., & Benitez, C. J. R. (trans.). (2019). Apocalypse. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 18(2), pp. 32-42. http://dx.doi.org/10.25120/etropic.18.2.2019.3704

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Published

2025-04-21

How to Cite

Yapan, A. B., & Benitez (Trans.), C. J. (2025). The Flower of Heidelberg. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 24(2), 245–260. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.24.2.2025.4140

Issue

Vol. 24 No. 2 (2025): Tropical Futurisms: Making Futures

Section

Stories

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