I’m in Cebu as I write is, attending the second edition of Taboan, the Philippine International Writers Festival which was first held in Manila at about this same time last year, February being National Arts Month.

Taboan will be making the rounds of the regions from year to year before returning to Manila, so this moveable feast (poet and NCCA commissioner Ricky de Ungria beat me to the metaphor) will see many places yet.

The Arts Council of Cebu under the very gracious festival director Mayen Tan and presidenta Petite Garcia is in charge of Taboan ’10, a project of the Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).

The festival got off to a lively start with a keynote speech by Cebu’s own Dr. Resil Mojares — a formidable, internationally recognized scholar of Philippine literature, history, and society — who chose a deliberately provocative subject and title for his talk: “Will Magdalena Jalandoni Ever Be a National Artist?”

For those who don’t know Jalandoni (and — perhaps to prove Resil’s point — 99.99 percent of us don’t), the Iloilo-born Jalandoni (1891-1978) was a prolific writer in Hiligaynon of fiction, poems, and plays, her novels alone totaling an astounding 36.

Resil made it clear that he wasn’t making a brief for Jalandoni’s selection as a National Artist; with typical scholarly modesty, he said that he simply didn’t know her work well enough to make that judgment.

Rather, he was using Jalandoni’s case to draw attention to the gross disadvantage at which Filipino writers working in languages other than English and Filipino lie, particularly when it comes to recognition on a national or international level.

While they may have achieved much in their own literature in, say, Cebuano, Bikol, or Hiligaynon, they remain obscure elsewhere, because their work has been little translated, little