Conversion is translation is conversion. Contracting Colonialism by Vicente Rafael is about the uneasy relationship between translation and conversion in the Spanish colonization of the Tagalog speakers of the Philippines from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. By reading curated Spanish and Tagalog sources during the period, Rafael examines “the impact of evangelization on the categories of social native life” and argues that “the consolidation of changes before the economic and social transformations of the 1760s had much to do with the institution of a new vocabulary for the social comprehension of death.” What I think is brilliant about Rafael’s argument is his offer to see conversion and translation as a site of constant tension. In the eyes of Tagalog-speaking people, Spanish translation and conversion to Christianity were part of their ways of dealing with the shock of colonization. Through exchange between their language and Spanish, Tagalog people, as Rafael shows, “sought ways to domesticate its dislocating effects. It was their interest in containing the anxiety aroused by a cluster of alien signs that motivated Tagalogs to appropriate things Spanish.”

The strength of Rafael’s analysis lies in his close attention to the structure and texture of his sources. In reading the work of a Dominican priest Francisco Blancas de San José, for instance, Rafael presents the logic of Blancas’ attempts to study and translate Tagalog language as “a passage to conversion.” This included the ways Blancas mechanically teased out Tagalog grammar and syntax, even when he worked under the framework of divinity (i.e., the translatability of language was an indication of its participation in the transfer and spread of God’s Word). However, for Tomas Pinpin, a Tagalog printer who published the Tagalog version of Blancas’s work in 1610, translation appeared as a mode “to elude the totalizing claims of Spanish signifying conventions.” For Pinpin, the comprehension of Castilian language was predicated “neither on its reduction to a grammar wholly external to it … nor on its semantic continuity with one’s own language. Instead, the possibility of translation was based on one’s capacity to anticipate the serial displacement of one’s first language by a second, and concurrently to see in the acoustic recurrence of the second the possibility of crossing back to the first.” In other words, it was reconceptualization, of which Castilian language could appear as a series of ordered sounds in the auit (song). “Castilian could, like Tagalog, be subjected to the special fit of rhythm and rhyme; its apprehension did not after all, depend, as the Spaniards seemed to think, on the fixing of semantic effects.”

Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism shares a similar postcolonial spirit as Reynaldo Illeto’s Pasyon and Revolution, a book on the history of the Philippine Revolution that uses popular pamphlets and songs as the main sources. Both books were also published in the same period (late 1980s-early 1990s) when the discussion of postcolonial historiography emerged as a serious attempt to challenge what people knew back then about colonialism. In this matter, Rafael argues about translation as the operating mechanism that both allowed and eluded colonization. Christian conversion and colonial rule in the Philippines emerged through what appeared to be “a series of mistranslations,” which were “ways to render the other understandable.” For the Spaniards, translation was a matter of “reducing the native language and culture to accessible objects for and subjects of divine and imperial intervention.” For the Tagalogs, it was less so. Instead, “translation was a process of less of internalizing colonial-Christian conventions than of evading their totalizing grip by repeatedly marking the difference between their language and interests and those of Spaniards.”

I truly enjoy the book, and I get more benefits as I read it after reading Sakai’s Translation and Subjectivity. Rafael’s examination of translation apparently resonates with Sakai’s exegesis on translation as enunciation of which repetitions are at the heart of the practice. I also like how Rafael put some of the sources in both the Tagalog language and English language. At last, Contracting Colonialism is not only important to understand Tagalog history but also offers a method on how to read translated texts in comparison to the original.