Philippine retroromanticism: Nick Joaquin and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

This article reads Nick Joaquin’s legends as a refractive translation
of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Leyendas. It proposes the term
retroromanticism to describe Joaquin’s deliberate return to
nineteenth-century Romantic forms at a moment when literary
modernism had become dominant. Focusing on “The Mass of
St. Sylvestre”, “The Legend of the Virgin’s Jewel” and “Doña
Jerónima”, the article argues that Joaquin reworks Bécquerian
motifs through the linguistic, historical and religious conditions of
the Philippines. Writing in English while imagining worlds that
would originally have unfolded in Spanish, Tagalog and Latin,
Joaquin produces texts in which translation is constitutive from
the outset. At the same time, this refractive process unfolds
within a Philippine setting shaped by Spanish colonial archives,
Catholic imagery and indigenous beliefs. As a result, Bécquer’s
Romantic imagination returns in altered form, transformed by
colonial memory, the trauma of World War II, multilingualism and
the search for Filipino identity. More broadly, the article proposes
retroromanticism as a category for understanding backwardlooking
aesthetic strategies in postcolonial contexts.