Flower of Heidelberg

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.