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Ang Kuwento ng Haring Tulala is Marlon J. Sales’s translation of Cronica del rey pasmado (The King Amaz’d: A Chronicle) by the famed Spanish author, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. A project of Cacho Publishing House in collaboration with the Embassy of Spain and Instituto Cervantes, Ang Kuwento ng Haring Tulala will be launched today, 6pm, at the Henry Sy, Sr. Hall of De La Salle University. The event is open to the public.

Published in 1989, the novel is set in the Spanish court in the 17th century. The king is consumed by the desire to see his queen in the nude, but this is forbidden by the customs of court. To deal with his urge, the king visits Marfisa, the most renowned courtesan in Spain. This encounter makes such an impression on His Majesty that his face becomes transfixed in a permanent expression of astonishment.*

Meanwhile, war looms against the British and the Dutch, a giant snake roams the land, and a crack appears in the streets, spewing sulphur. This well-loved novel, adapted for film by Imanol Uribe in 1991, is told from the point of view of court gossips and assorted spectators. It is a comic tale of sex, tradition, ritual, and politics set in the Spanish Inquisition.

Author Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (1910-1999) was a novelist, essayist and playwright who received the Cervantes Prize, the most significant literary award in the Spanish-speaking world, in 1995. Marlon J. Sales is a translator, researcher and professor of Spanish whose previous works include translations of Gabriel Miro’s Our Father San Daniel (2011) and The Leprous Bishop (2012).

In his foreword, publisher and book designer RayVi Sunico notes that “Translation is a valuable tool not only for the forging of a national language but also for the refinement of a national culture and sensibility. We only need to think of the image of our own archipelago as a shattered earthenware pot to see the need for bridges that will connect the islands and communities now separated by water, distance and history.”

Ang Kuwento ng Haring Tulala will soon be available in bookstores.

* So that’s what pasmado means! When we were kids our parents would warn us not to wash our hands after writing or make faces in front of an electric fan—”Baka ma-pasma ka!” As in frozen stiff, dumbfounded, stunned.