Harold Augenbraum
Photo by Leslie Shipman
Bio
Harold Augenbraum is an American writer, editor, and translator. He is currently acting editor of The Yale Review. Previously he was executive director of the National Book Foundation, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Asian American Writers Workshop, and vice chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. Augenbraum has published six books on Latino literature and translations of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition and the Filipino novelist Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El filibusterismo for Penguin Classics.
About Pedro Alejandro Paterno
Paterno (1857-1911) was among the first Filipino authors to write in the colonial language, and was part of a group of young Filipino expatriates in Madrid known as "ilustrados" who set out through their work to display the cultural history of the Philippines, which both secular and religious Spanish colonizers denied before the late-19th century. Ninay centers on a young Filipino man in the 19th century who has lived abroad for most of his life but has returned home. While home he visits houses afflicted by cholera during the epidemic in Manila and begins to discover his culture. The novel is sprinkled with flora, fauna, and place-names that Paterno explains in extensive footnotes.