Mentee Update: Southeast Asian Translation Mentorship

Our inaugural mentee, Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis, has been working over the past year on her project of translating the martyred revolutionary poet and activist, Kerima Lorena Tariman.
 
We are pleased to share that Amanda's first translation publication has appeared on Words Without Borders. Read the poem here. The publication is accompanied by the following text:

 

In commemoration of Day of the Imprisoned Writer coming up on November 15th, we present a translation of a poet in jail by a poet in jail. “June 12th, In Prison” was written by the Filipina poet and activist Kerima Lorena Tariman during her incarceration in 2000 for illegal possession of firearms, a common non-bailable and trumped-up charge used by the state against activists. The case was subsequently dismissed and Tariman was released after more than a year, though Tariman would eventually die in 2021 at the age of 42 at the hands of the Philippine military.

 

The poem has been translated by writer and activist Amanda Echanis, who was arrested in December 2020 (on similar trumped-up charges as Tariman twenty years prior). She was taken into custody along with her month-old baby, from whom she is now separated as she remains in jail. Echanis’s hearings have been repeatedly postponed and she remains in detention to this day. Echanis’s detainment occurs in the context of a larger government practice of “red-tagging” and misusing the justice system to detain activists and those critical of the government. Months prior to her own arrest, Echanis’s father, the peasant rights and peace advocate Randall Echanis, at age 72, became a victim of rampant extrajudicial killings meant to silence longtime activists such as himself. He was brutally murdered at his home in Quezon City, along with his neighbor.