This Women in Translation month, we’re kickstarting Translating Feminisms 2: chapbooks by women and nonbinary writers from Indonesia and the Philippines. We spoke to Faye Cura, founder/publisher of Gantala Press, about Translating Feminisms, Pa-Liwanag, and the experience of working on the chapbook.

Can you tell our readers about the process of working with team TAP on Pa-Liwanag?
It was wonderful working with team TAP. Deborah let us build the manuscript at our own pace and was patient, encouraging, and generous the whole time. We are also learning a lot from TAP about best practices in independent publishing. We are inspired by the support that TAP and the TF2 project are getting, and are honored to be part of an international endeavor to make Asian women's voices heard. This project has also made us look closer at the potential and power of translation and translating women in our own work.

How has the curatorial and editorial experience been for you – from commissioning to working with translators and more? What were the rewards you gained and the challenges you faced during this journey?
Initially, we released an online call for submissions to the sampler. As a result, the works were limited to those by professional writers, or writers who have access to social media and the Internet. To balance that out, we asked peasant women, women migrant workers, indigenous women, women workers and activists for permission to include works of theirs which had already been published, either in Gantala's own anthologies or in other publications. We are proud of the representation contained in Pa-Liwanag because the works are not only literary; they talk about the actual lives, struggles, and aspirations of ordinary women. We realized that there is no lack of women translators in the Philippines. Any woman writer can and does translate her own works from the vernacular to English or other Philippine languages.

One of the questions at the soul of this series is 'Does feminism translate?' Can you please speak to this?
Yes, feminism translates. The desire for a better life for one's self and family, for justice and peace for one's community, translates. Women share a lot of experiences, thoughts, and emotions especially if they belong to the same race, culture, and class. Often, women do not even need to speak to understand each other. They translate for other sectors, or maybe for women from completely different realities (like the very rich, sheltered, or privileged). What we did in Pa-Liwanag is to merely say in another language things that women intrinsically know or understand.

How would you describe your chapbook, Pa-Liwanag, in a single sentence to our readers and pledgers?
Pa-Liwanag is a collection of poems and prose, in translation and a few in the original English, by Filipinas from all walks of life.

What are your thoughts on the first Translating Feminisms series – do you have a favourite chapbook? What made you want to join the family?
I love it -- the chapbooks are beautifully designed, light and portable. My favorite is Night by Sulochana Manandhar. Hers are the first Nepali poems I have ever encountered, and they're glimmering. Deborah and I were introduced to each other by Nash Tysmans, a Filipina writer who is currently based in Belgium. Nash has been introducing Gantala Press to many feminists and feminist groups around the world -- she was also the one who connected us to the Jakarta Feminist Association, with whom we are now about to organize a Southeast Asian feminist network. We were thrilled when Deborah asked us to come up with a sampler of works from the Philippines. It was only a bit later when we realized that she is the translator of Han Kang!

What are you reading this Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth)?
I just finished writing a collection of poems in Filipino based on Sappho's fragments. I used Anne Carson's If Not, Winter as my main reference. I had also finished reading I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, translated by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Now I am reading about the controversy that erupted when a white male academic questioned the truth of Menchu's story. It makes me think more than ever of the importance of women and the dispossessed telling their own stories, and of the value of translating women's stories.