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 backward-looking aesthetic strategies in postcolonial contexts.