Christian Jil Benitez is a poet, scholar, translator, and educator from the Philippines. He is the author of Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (ADMU Press, 2022) and translator of Arasahas: Poems from the Tropics (PAWA Press, 2024).

Isang Dalumat ng Panahon

Ateneo de Manila UP, 2022

Best Book of Literary Criticism/Cultural Studies, 41st Philippine National Book Awards

Isang Dalumat ng Panahon ("A Theory of Time") attempts to articulate a "Filipino" notion of time, through harnessing literature as its object and method, turning to a wide range of texts, from precolonial folk poetry and colonial dictionary entries, to contemporary Philippine scholarship and journalistic writings. What emerges thus is a vernacular intuition of time as panahon, or the opportunity for things to become. This idea is further pursued through exploring related concepts such as the mythic and the bountiful; the materiality and arrival of things; trope and tropicality; contemporaneity and history; and love and metaphor. In doing so, the book demonstrates a new vocabulary for temporality as it is specifically embodied in the Philippine world.

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Praise

What Benitez offers is a valuable text on time... with exceptional attention, patience, and embrace to the Filipino worldview that is rooted in indigenous and mythological sensibilities. Here lies the hope that in the midst of present instability of ideas and systems of thinking, some virtues still hold and remain certain.
— Alvin Yapan, author of Worship the Body and Ang Bisa ng Pag-uulit sa Katutubong PanitikanIsang Dalumat ng Panahon is an incisive theoretical discourse on time through literature... Exceeding simple translation of or borrowing from phenomenological studies on temporality, Benitez opens a clear contribution: how to identify and practice such a study in the particular ecology that is the Philippines...
— Gary C. Devilles, author of Sensing ManilaIn this book, Benitez creates a "language of his own," with an exceptional style on discourse, that can only be idiolectical: the sign of emergence of a true theorist and critic!
—Oscar V. Campomanes, co-editor of Colonialism & Modernity: Re-mapping Philippine HistoriesBetween these pages is a careful attentiveness to the theory proposed, for each gesture of time described is enveloped in the materiality of history... What can only transpire from such placedness is a sense of planetarity that is most rooted in Filipino consciousness.
— Jaya Jacobo, author of Arasahas: Mga Tula...A novel and comprehensive study on a subject matter that is seldom considered in the field of literary studies, Christian Benitez's Isang Dalumat ng Panahon... advances an attempt to discourse time and how it is experienced in relation to the idea of being Filipino.
—Citation, 41st Philippine National Book Awards

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Arasahas: Poems from the Tropics

English translation of Jaya Jacobo's Arasahas: Mga Tula (Savage Mind Publishing House, 2023)

Philippine American Writers Association (PAWA) Press, 2024
Longlist, 2023-2024 John Dryden Translation Competition, BCLA

In Arasahas, Filipino poet Jaya Jacobo writes of the tropics as both time and place, as well as a sensibility through which one may understand and come to terms with the world. Translated by Christian Jil Benitez, the poems in this collection intimate how being tropical not only conjures torridities, but more importantly, entitles one to tenderness.

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Praise

Drawing from the wild and natural landscape while refracted through disrupted syntax, interpersonal nostalgia, religiosity, folklore and music, these poems dramatise and reflect—nearly in shards while also steeped in shadow —the divided self and spirit in evolution, braving transition and thus in forlorn conflict with our uncompromising world. Here are linguistic insurrections, cosmic disavowals and inward feats of courage we must recognise as necessary in order to become, transform, soar or even transcend.
— Cyril Wong, author of Infinity Diary and BeachlightJaya Jacobo is a high priestess of yearning, her rapt, incantatory words at once all texture and sinew yet also gossamer, ethereal. In Arasahas she summons the agony and rapture of desire in its manifold incarnations, traversing moments from the historically and culturally specific to the ephemeral to ones existing beyond time. Language may be inchoate in distilling truth but Jacobo’s svelte poetry–and Benitez’s translation–revels in the possibility and anticipation of such an epiphany blossoming, as hushed, delicate, fleeting as it may be.
— Isabel Sandoval, director of Lingua FrancaConjuring the personal and the mythological, Jaya’s work calls us into an intimacy with both flesh and spirit, each poem a sacred utterance laced with the animistic past, decolonial futurity and most of all, an unfolding trans experience in a new, contested world. In this luminous translation by Christian Benitez, Jacobo reminds us of the power of the other and of being both creature and creation.
—Bhenji Ra, transdisciplinary artistJaya Jacobo’s poetry, in the original Filipino, startles in how it amplifies qualities that make the lyric what it is. Reveling in the material and historical filaments of the language while placing the subject in environments that display her cosmopolitanism, Jacobo, in poem after poem, manages to be both lush and flamboyant, on the one hand, and spare, on the other, skillfully deploying the genre’s acknowledged obsession with le mot juste and its predilection for resonance through distillation. Her image work is highly sensuous, sweltering, even sticky—and yet, her poetry also pursues its analytical flirtation with precise abstractions and unnamable vulnerabilities. Christian Jil Benitez’s translation further contributes to this already intricate coalition of paradoxes, fusing a sinewy handling of syntax attuned to the hermeneutic generosity of the contemporary fragment with the undeniable authority of Jacobo’s voice.
— Mark Anthony Cayanan, author of Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous

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Christian Jil R. Benitez is a poet, scholar, translator, and educator from the Philippines. He teaches at the Department of Filipino, Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU), where he earned his AB-MA in Filipino Literature. Currently based in Bangkok, Thailand, he is pursuing his PhD in comparative literature at Chulalongkorn University through a Second Century Fund (C2F) Scholarship, working on his dissertation on a nonhuman comparative poetics via the 19th-century Filipino thinker José Rizal, with a particular attention to botanic matters.Hailed as Poet of the Year 2018 by the Commission on the Filipino Language, his writing has been given recognition in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards, and the Talaang Ginto of the Commission on the Filipino Language, among others. His critical and creative works in both English and Filipino primarily move around the idea of time, tropicality, and the nonhuman. His first book, Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (ADMU Press, 2022) was hailed as the Best Book of Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies at the 41st Philippine National Book Award.He is a member of the interdisciplinary research network Rethinking the Order of Time; and the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle, where he served as chairperson for the filmic year 2019. He is also the associate editor of the journal Katipunan, published by the Department of Filipino, ADMU. Previously, he was the head of the Creative Writing Desk of the Ateneo Institute of Literary Arts and Practices, where he directed the annual Ateneo National Writers Workshop (2018-2023).He is also currently translating contemporary Filipino literature to English, including fiction by Alvin Yapan and Allan Derain. His translation of Jaya Jacobo's poetry collection Arahas: Poems from the Tropics was recently published by PAWA Press.