Words are All We Have

By Alfred Yuson


Declared “Word of the Year” at the annual language conference Sawikaan 2006 sponsored last month by the Filipinas Institute of Translation (FIT), Blas F. Ople Foundation and the NCCA was “lobat.” It won over four other finalists chosen by the conferees: “botox,” “toxic,” “spa,” and “orocan.”

Ateneo professor Jelson Capilos presented the case for “lobat” -- Pinoyese for “low battery (charge)” -- while Dr. Luis Gatmaitan championed “botox” and U.P. instructor Michael Andrada held out for “toxic.”

In a fascinating report, Romulo P. Baquiran Jr. of FIT wrote: “Sawikaan 2006 looked at the development of Filipino as a national language and focused on new words or phrases that were popular in thelocal socio-cultural scene in the preceding year.

“‘Lobat’ made it as top choice because of its interesting and relevant review of literature, clear presentation, and the startling conclusion that Filipinos nowadays are much like cellular phones -- the ubiquitous machines that symbolize modernity -- that rely so much on the mini-batteries that discharge energy in no time. Filipinos go ‘lobat’ because of personal, social, and global pressure.

“‘Botox,’ a brand name of a toxin injected into faces to erase wrinkles, easily made it as second choice, being popular among many beauty-conscious Filipinos who can afford the expensive treatment.

“‘Toxic’ refers to periods when operators in call centers receive an excessive number of calls. Or it can be used as a tag for any irksome person, thing, or experience.

“‘Spa’ of course is what you need when things go ‘lobat’ or ‘toxic’ ‘Orocan,’ a plastic product brand, refers to hypocrites and liars. The lone entry from Mindanao, ‘kudkod’ refers to Internet chatting, particularly the kind that aims to find a potential mate.Other word-of-the-year entries included ‘cha-cha,’ ‘bird flu,’ ‘meningococemia,’ ‘karir,’ and ‘payreted.’

“Now on its third year, Sawikaan is held at the University of the Philippines and attended by teachers, linguists, and students who come from all over the country. It aptly celebrates the Buwan ng Wika.”

Last year’s winner was poet Bobby Anonuevo’s proferred “jueteng,” while in 2004, the vote went to Prof. Randy David’s “canvass.”

The yearly Sawikaan is as good an enterprise as any to accentuate the bilingualism, even multi-lingualism, that we Filipinos enjoy. All the entries cited above, except for “kudkod,” aren’t native terms, but rather highlight the appropriation process we often revel in -- the same that has given the nationalistic Japanese the word “besboru” for baseball, and the language-purist French “le weekend.”

Words are a funny lot. It is languages that often take themselves seriously, or rather, that are taken much too seriously.

A week ago I perorated in a writing class on how a seemingly picayune alteration can dramatically transform a word or phrase, so that we have to be very careful in dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s. To say, for instance, “I’ll have a word with him,” means so differently from “I had words with him.” The pluralization raised the bar from civil counsel to an exchange of angry barbs.

Some of us may have read Lynne Truss’ now-classic little book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, where the crucial importance of punctuation marks is played up so wittily. I’d recommend it as a study manual to an inflight magazine editor who nonchalantly splays out his commas to function as breath breaks.

Maybe he should also get a copy, the second edition, of Jose A. Carillo’s English Plain and Simple: The No-Nonsense Guide to Learn Today’s Global Language, which received a National Book Award last year. Since government has mandated a U-turn towards English-language proficiency, we might as well not only get good or better at it, but also experience the joy and wonder the global lingua franca can offer.

But it doesn’t really matter which language we take to heart or master. Words from any language become fascinating in context with one another and the rest of worldspeak.

Running into a young Filipina poet, Beverly Sy, recently while waiting for my daughter to come out of U.P.’s Palma Hall, I asked if she knew of any rationalization for the Pinoy idiom “naghalo ang balat sa tinalupan.” How did it become “sa” instead of “at”? She stared at the sky over Diliman while knitting her brows, before saying, “Oo nga, ano.”

A day later she e-mailed a report on how she had asked a U.P. prof about the matter. He said that “sa” was correct because “sequential ang pangyayari, binalatan muna ang isang bagay bago nagkaroon ng balat at tinalupan. Isa pa, sabi rin niya, kaya ginamit ang ‘naghalo’ kasi may force. Hindi raw pwede ang ‘humalo’ kasi parang natural ang dating. Walang puwersa, kumbaga sa pagkain, bland ang lasa.”

Hmm. But I wasn’t saying it was incorrect, since I’ve heard and used that Pinoy idiom all my life. There must be something more to it. As for any force majeure, methought the prof was talking through his hat.

Beverly or “Bebang” saved me from any further irritation by disclosing how she had also serendipitously discovered that among the books she was carrying the day before was Mga Kinamihasnang Salitang Tagalog by Rosendo Ignacio, a 1963 edition, which stated:

“Kinamihasnang salita o idiom --yaong salita o pamamaraan ng pagsasalitang mali sa mga tuntunin ng gramatika o balarila ngunit kinagawian na kaya’t ang paggamit ay tinutulutan na rin sa larangan ng panitikan o kung hindi man mali ay ginagamit lang sa isang tiyak na kahulugang malayo sa dapat mangyari gaya halimbawa ng ‘nagkahalo ang balat sa tinalupan.’ Ang pagkakayari ng pananalitang ito, mali sa gramatika at balarila, ngunit kinagawian na kaya’t tinutulutan nang gamitin. Ang wasto ay ganito: ‘nangagkahalo ang balat at tinalupan’ na dahil naman sa pagkakawasto ay nawawala ang uri ng pagiging kinamihasnang salita o idiom.”

O, eh di tama ang sapantaha ko. Nakagawian lang. Idioms, in particular, are so subject to common usage that like a lie, fallacy, or urban legend, they get a life of their own and make pasintabi the usual requisites of grammar.

Strange and enchanting are languages, but much more so the words that compose them.

Nights I have the time for leisure and trivia appreciation, I turn to a bookmarked site, http://languagehat.com -- which I can’t begin to rave about as a source of stimulation. Let’s settle for someone else’s blurb:

“Evidence that the Internet is not as idiotic as it often looks. This site is called Language Hat and it deals with many issues of a linguistic flavor. It’s a beacon of attentiveness and crisp thinking, and an excellent substitute for the daily news.”

One of its links recently led me to “A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia,” which constantly gets revised and expanded. Here I share as much of the bounty as space will allow, for now:

“ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC is the longest acronym in the 1965 edition of the Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations Dictionary. It is a Navy term
standing for Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command...

“However, the world’s longest acronym according to the Guinness Book of Words is NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSB OMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT (56 letters, 54 in Cyrillic). Found in the Concise Dictionary of Soviet Terminology, it means: The laboratory for shuttering, reinforcement, concrete and ferroconcrete operations for composite-monolithic and monolithic constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building-assembly operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for building mechanization and technical aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.

“ESCALATOR is one of many words that were originally trademarks but have become ordinary words found in dictionaries. Some other words which were originally trademarks (or still are) are AQUA-LUNG, ASPIRIN, AUTOHARP, BAKELITE, BAND-AID, BREATHALYZER, BVD, CELLOPHANE, CELLULOID, CORNFLAKES, CUBE STEAK, DACRON, DEEPFREEZE, DICTAPHONE, DITTO, DRY ICE, DUMPSTER, FORMICA, FRISBEE, GRANOLA, GUNK, HEROIN, JACUZZI, JEEP, JELL-O, KEROSENE, KLEENEX, LANOLIN, MACE, MIMEOGRAPH,...

“The longest ‘repeaters’ are BUMPETY-BUMPETY, BUMPITY-BUMPITY,POCKETA-POCKETA (an engine sound, OED).
“Some 12-letter ‘repeaters’ are ANGANG-ANGANG (a type of Javanese gong), ANTING-ANTING (a Philippine charm or amulet), CADANG-CADANG (blight of coconut trees), DOUBLE-DOUBLE (MWCD11), KILLEEKILLEE (W2), TANGANTANGAN (the castor oil plant)...

“Some 10-letter ‘repeaters’ are BELLABELLA (a native of western Canada), BLING BLING (used to describe diamonds, jewelry and all forms of showy
style), BUDDY-BUDDY, FIFTY-FIFTY, GIRLY-GIRLY, GOODY-GOODY, HUBBA-HUBBA, ILANG-ILANG (var. spelling of YLANG-YLANG)...

Some 8-letter ‘repeaters’ are AGAR AGAR, BANG-BANG, BERIBERI, BLAH-BLAH, CHIN-CHIN, CHOP-CHOP, CHOWCHOW, COUSCOUS, HULA-HULA, HUSH-HUSH, IPIL-IPIL, LAPULAPU, LOMILOMI (Hawaiian massage), MAHIMAHI (Hawaiian fish)... TIKITIKI (used to treat beriberi)...

“Place names with this property include: BADEN-BADEN (in Germany), BORA BORA (an island in French Polynesia), FOFO FOFO (a town in Papua), GRONG GRONG (a town in Australia), ILOILO (city in Philippines), PAGO PAGO (Am. Samoa)...

“Roger Fenton writes, ‘As you know, this is common means of word formation in Polynesian languages, as an intensifier, pluraliser, or to create related words... According to Oscar van Vlijmen, repetition is the normal procedure to form plurals of substantives in the Indonesian language. For example, orang = man, orang orang = men.

“IMPETICOS is an example of a nonce word (a word which has been found to have been used only once). The word is spoken by the clown in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. W2 says perhaps it means ‘impocket.’”

Hmm. Let’s argue against all that. Baka naman ‘impakto’?

YO-YO was a brand name? So what did Rizal call his shipboard plaything? And why is KILIKILI misspelled, TANGANTANGAN confined to just one meaning? We’re familiar with CADANG-CADANG, YLANG-YLANG, AGAR AGAR, IPIL-IPIL, LAPULAPU, and TIKITIKI for BERIBERI. But they’re obviously not with the longest repetitive syllabic dialogue that makes sense: “BABABA BA?”

“BABABA.”

Alfred Yuson is a columnist for the Manila-based Philippine Star. He can be reached at kripbam@email.com.ph

Black Eyed Peas: Big Love for Little Manila

Last month, international pop stars the Black Eyed Peas premiered their new video for “Bebot,” set in Stockton’s Little Manila Historic Site, circa 1938. The video premiered in LosAngeles and in the Philippines on August 3, and online worldwide at www.kidheroes.net/bebot on August 4.

The Little Manila Foundation, which works to preserve the Little Manila Historic Site, hopes the video will be an entertaining history lesson for a young generation of Filipino Americans and young fans of the Black Eyed Peas, and that it will bring attention to the need for restoring the buildings.

Last year, the Foundation purchased the historic Mariposa Hotel, a three story residential hotel next to the Rizal Social Club, which had been home to hundreds of Filipino immigrants through the decades.

They are kicking off a campaign to raise $1.5 million to restore and revitalize the building, which will be the site of the Filipino American Cultural Center and Phase One of the Filipino American National Museum, a project of the Filipino American National Historical Society.

The Foundation produced a mini companion documentary for “Bebot” at www.littlemanila.net that describes the history of the Little Manila area and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the production.

In the video, Apl.de.Ap (Allan Pineda), plays a young Filipino immigrant who visits a dance hall, the Rizal Social Club, in Stockton’s Little Manila, in 1938. There, he rocks a crowd backed up by a jazz band. In its time, the Rizal Social Club, at 138 E. Lafayette Street, was a dance hall owned by a Filipino American entrepreneur. It was one of the hottest spots in downtown Stockton’s vibrant Little Manila neighborhood, which was the largest Filipino neighborhood in the nation from the 1920s to the 1970s.

“It’s not just about doing a video,” Apl said. “Filipino culture is like a community movement, and it feels good to represent my culture and to be embraced by my people.”

“Actually, it’s based on true history,” director Patricio Ginelsa added. “I took Apl’s farmer roots and placed him in the role of a Filipino farmer,” Ginelsa said. “Back then, Filipino farmers had their day jobs, but all we looked forward to, though, was getting in our best suits and going to the best clubs - looking nice, and meeting all the bebots (hot chicks)!”

Ginelsa said he first learned about the significance of the Little Manila Historic Site and early Filipino American history on an extended trip to Stockton in the summer of 2000 to promote the Filipino American independent film “The Debut.”

“The Little Manila Foundation struggles to kind of keep all thesehistoric landmarks alive and (they were) making sure they weren’t torn down,” said Ginelsa. “As a filmmaker, this was a story that needed to be told in some way. It was really their campaign to raise awareness about Little Manila that really inspired me, and I was able to make a music video with a worldwide band.”

“I think it’s important to learn something about Filipino American history that you can’t read in your U.S. history books,” Ginelsa said. “I learned about it while living in Stockton with the community leaders and the youth. It really inspired me.”

“Bebot” which is loosely translated as “hot chick,” recreates the world of 1930s Stockton. Few Filipino women immigrate to the United States before World War II, and Filipinos lived in a mostly-male world. To have contact with women, Filipinos flocked to downtown Stockton and Little Manila’s dance halls.

In 1938, Stockton was rigidly segregated. In the video, Apl and the Peas pass a hotel emblazoned with “Positively No Filipinos Allowed.”

Such signs were common in Stockton and in many California cities before the Civil Rights movement.

Last year, Little Manila Foundation helped to save the original Rizal Social Club, now shuttered, from a wrecking ball. A developer had planned to raze the entire neighborhood, but community pressure from the Foundation, and a new administration at City Hall, prevented the destruction. The Foundation argued that the building, and the block, had historic significance for all Filipinos nationwide and in the Philippines. The fact that the multi-platinum Black Eyed Peas chose Stockton as the setting for the video for “Bebot” bears this out, says Dillon Delvo, executive director of the Little Manila Foundation.

“We are so honored that one of the biggest music groups right now
chose to set their newest video in Stockton’s Little Manila Historic Site,” said Delvo, who was a consultant to the video. Delvo and members of the Little Manila Foundation traveled to L.A., where they assisted in the production. “We taught the band and extras how to cut asparagus, and talked with them about what life was like in the 1930s for Filipinos in Stockton.”

Delvo said that filming the entire video in Stockton was too cost prohibitive with a large cast and crew, so they filmed interiors in another significant site-Historic Filipinotown in Los Angeles.

The crew filmed exteriors in the Little Manila Historic Site. The video features cameos from Filipino American celebrities such as American Idol finalist Jasmine Trias and local Stocktonians.

The video project, produced and directed by Filipino American independent filmmaker Patricio Ginelsa and singlehandedly funded by the Peas’ Filipino American member, Apl.de.Ap, was a labor of love for all involved. The Peas’ record company had little interest in promoting the all-Tagalog single, but the group and the production company felt that it was important to bring an aspect of Filipino American history to the group’s fans and to the larger community in general. It is unknown whether the video will receive airplay on MTV and VH-1. Online distribution, community viewings, and film festivals will bring the video to wide audiences.

The song’s lyrics, all in Tagalog, describe Pineda’s childhood in the Philippines, and his experiences as an immigrant in the United States. In the song, he expresses thanks to his Filipino American fans for their support. In the video, Apl plays a young Filipino immigrant who works in the field cutting asparagus in the San Joaquin Delta all day, then dresses up to dance and perform at a jazz and dance club at night.

“Apl’s real-life experiences as a Filipino immigrant in the United States who leaves a life of poverty in the rural Philippines, misses home, and struggles against racism to make a life in America, mirrors the experiences of early Filipino immigrants who came to Stockton in the 1920s and 1930s, so the song is actually very fitting to depict how these early Pinoy pioneers saw themselves,” said Dawn B. Mabalon, a co-founder of the Little Manila Foundation, and a professor of history at San Francisco State University. Along with Delvo, she provided background research and historic photographs for the production.

Mabalon says the video is a good historical interpretation of life in Stockton’s Little Manila in 1938. The video shows the Peas working in asparagus, and then getting dressed up at night to go out to the dance halls in downtown. “Filipinos came to the Central Valley and performed backbreaking work in the agricultural fields, particularly in asparagus, but at night, they had a reputation for being the sharpest dressers in Macintosh and zoot suits, the slickest dancers, the best jazz musicians,” she said. “The video depicts all of that hardship and all of the fun that must have been life for Filipinos in Depression-era Stockton. Because of the sex ratio imbalance of very few Filipino women and a lot of young, single Filipino men, the multiracial dance halls were like magnets to Filipinos.”

Stockton was the party central for Filipinos in the United States, she said, an aspect of history depicted in the “Bebot” video.

“Stockton in the 1930s was a wide-open town : gambling, dance
halls, pool halls, saloons. To turn a blind eye, police were paid off handsomely, and so these young bachelors flocked from all over the nation to Stockton for fun,” she said. Stockton in the 1930s, according to oldtimers, was even more fun than downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco, Mabalon said.

Historic photographs of Ernie Hernandez’s 1930s jazz band from the 1930s, San Joaquin County asparagus crews, and photographs of young Filipinos dressed in snazzy suits taken on El Dorado Street in the 1930s were used as inspiration for the production design, down to some painstaking detail.

The crew, for example, tracked down a similar guitar to the one used in the Hernandez jazz band photograph.

The Little Manila Foundation works to preserve and revitalize the last remaining buildings of the Little Manila neighborhood, which was ravaged by urban redevelopment in recent decades.

Since 1999, the Little Manila Foundation has fought developers and demolition-happy politicians to save the remaining buildings, among them, the original Rizal Social Club. In 2002, the city designated four blocks of downtown Stockton as the Little Manila Historic Site.

In 2003, the National Trust for Historic Preservation added the Little Manila Historic Site to their annual list of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in the nation.

Since then, the Foundation has successfully saved the neighborhood from imminent destruction, and continues to educate the public about the need for Filipino American cultural and historic preservation in Stockton. They hope to restore and open the Mariposa Hotel in 2007.

“Our struggle continues as we begin the process of remodeling and refurbishing the Mariposa Hotel to help remind us of our past struggles but also to celebrate the contributions and our participation in building this country,” said Rico Reyes, co-chair of the Little Manila Foundation. “The community’s financial commitment is crucial to preserving and revitalizing the neighborhood known as Little Manila.”

Tax-deductible gifts can be sent to the Little Manila Foundation, PO Box 1356, Stockton, CA 95201.The Black Eyed Peas video “Bebot” can be viewed at www.kidheroes.net/bebot/index.html. The Little Manila Foundation has produced a short companion documentary to the video, which can be viewed at http://www.littlemanila.net.

Found in Translation

By Eric Gamalinda

‘Language and its power are a central element in the Noli, and I wanted to bring that out by developing a translation that would reflect Rizal’s belief in the inherent problems of linguistic
communication ... ‘ -- H. Augenbraum

Jose Rizal’s ghost weaves in and out of the American literary psyche. But until recently the Philippines’ übermensch has been a subject of mostly scholarly study, and though many second or third generation Filipino Americans may have heard of him, not many of them have had the opportunity to read Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, the novel that sparked the Philippine revolution against Spain.

That should no longer be a problem now. The novel has been newly translated by Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation, the organization responsible for giving the National Book Award. It has been included in the Penguin Classics list, finally making Rizal’s novel available more widely, especially to a new generation of readers.

Earlier translations of the novel were either inadequate or imprecise; Augenbraum notes mistranslations or unnecessary liberties in Charles Derbyshire’s first translation (published as The Social Cancer in 1912), for example, and also regrets the fact that the latest translation, by Soledad Lacson-Locsin, which came out as part of the Philippine Centennial commemoration in 1996, needed just a bit more copy editing (Lacson-Locsin died before she could proofread the final text). Though Augenbraum tactfully refrains from mentioning it anywhere in his impressive introduction, many of us who’ve read the subsequent translation by Leon Ma. Guerrero, who published his translation as The Lost Eden, always suspected that Guerrero substantially altered the text to tone down Rizal’s rhetoric against the Filipino feudal bourgeoisie.

This new translation corrects all that. Augenbraum’s scholarship is breathtaking, to say the least, and includes copious notes on the work, the milieu, and Rizal’s literary and historical references. He has chosen to remain faithful to the text, including Rizal’s quirky tendency to shift between tenses. The translation approximates the flow of the original Spanish, surely welcome news to readers who have had to suffer through the earlier translations’ stilted and ponderous language. Revealed here is the novel as Rizal had actually written it, sardonic, incisive, often playful, and immensely readable. But most importantly, Rizal’s novel will give an international readership a fairly clear idea of the roots of Philippine society, much of which - feudal patronage, the great divide between rich and poor, religious superstition and colonial mentality, among other things - hasn’t changed since the novel first stirred controversy in 1887.

Augenbraum has also published Growing Up Latino, Encyclopedia Latina, The Latina Reader, and U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers, as well as a revised translation of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition. Philippine Post caught up with him shortly before the book party in New York to celebrate the publication of his translation of Noli Me Tangere.

PHILIPPINE POST (PP): How did you get interested in Rizal, and in Philippine literature?

HAROLD AUGENBRAUM (HA): In 1992 I was compiling a bibliography of Latino fiction writers of the United States, and being the library and bookstore rat I am, I was combing shelves for any Hispanic last name on a book. At one point I came across the writer N.V.M. Gonzalez and thought he might be a U.S. Latino. He wasn’t, of course, but I read one of his collections of short stories and Rizal was mentioned several times, in reverential tones. I was working at the Mercantile Library of New York, which has one of the best fiction collections in America, so I went into the stacks and retrieved the Guerrero translation of the Noli, which I read, and which fascinated me, not only because of the story but because of the cultural and political elements in the Spanish Colonial Philippines that created a whole new world for me and my own imaginative construct of the Philippines.
I then read the Fili. Then I went to the public library and found a copy of the Austin Coates biography of Rizal and found Rizal himself to be fascinating, for reasons I mention in my introduction to the Noli. I was so overwhelmed that I wrote to several university presses and offered to edit an older translation of the Noli and provide a new introduction, but there were no takers.
When the Lacson-Locsin translation appeared in Manila, a friend of mine, knowing of my interest, sent me copies. It subsequently appeared from the University of Hawai’i Press. I was disappointed. Although I thought her intentions were good, she died before her version was properly edited and I thought its appearance would forestall the appearance of a good new translation.
I was mentioning this to Luis Francia one day and he encouraged me to do my own translation. Finally, my editor at Penguin - where I had done a revision of Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition - asked if there were any other books I thought should be in the Penguin Classics, so I suggested Rizal.
I had a full-time job (still do) and a family (still do) and other projects in the works (still do), so the translation took three years, when I thought it would take one. Plus I wanted to put together an introduction and notes that would provide a much-needed introduction for non-Filipino readers to the text and to the culture of the time, so it took a while. From my “discovery” of Rizal to publication was thirteen years.

PP: In what ways did you envision this version to be different from existing translations? (You note, for instance, that you retained Rizal’s idiosyncratic use of tenses.)

HA: I translated with a couple of things in mind. One, I wanted to reflect Rizal’s caustic sense of humor and use of puns, which have not emerged from other translations. An example might be the Dámaso sermon chapter. When Dámaso, speaking about saints and sinners, yells, “It is manifest, manifest, manifest!”, I chose that word because in another usage it means “bill of lading”. So when the dozing liquor salesman hears it, the play on words can work just as well in both Spanish and English. Language and its power are a central element in the Noli, and I wanted to bring that out by developing a translation that would reflect Rizal’s belief in the inherent problems of linguistic communication, which run through the entire book. Second, I wanted to reflect the tone of Rizal’s style in Castilian, which is why I used contractions in much of the dialogue. That reflects the elision of Spanish pronouns and relieves much of the tonic awkwardness of some earlier translation. I also left some Spanish in the text, especially in titles and honorifics, like Señor, so that readers would be reminded that it was originally in that language. In other words, I wanted it to sound like it had been written originally in English with reminders that it had not been. Then the introduction is different from others. Because of the audience, I couldn’t assume that readers would know anything at all about Rizal or Filipino history prior to the Second World War. Translators in the Philippines can probably assume that their readers will have an understanding - in varying degrees -- of Rizal and the country’s history.

PP: How do you think Rizal will resonate with today’s American readership? Or do you think Rizal will remain a largely scholarly subject?

HA: I think American readers will enjoy Rizal because the story is engaging and American readers like good stories. On the other hand, translated books rarely get widespread readership here, translated books from the nineteenth century rarely sell well if the author is not well-known, and Philippine culture other than the Bataan March, Imelda Marcos’s shoes and Subic Bay is little known.
Rizal opened up a whole new world of Philippine culture and literature for me. I subsequently read as widely as I could in what was available, Bulosan, Rosca, Ty-Casper, Hagedorn, Francia, Gamalinda, Carbo, Sionil José, Gonzalez, Joaquin, Cabico, Santos, and several anthologies. I even did a couple of periodical reviews of Filipino and Filipino-American literature. I don’t consider myself very well read in Filipino literature, or Filipino-American literature, but I’ll be thrilled if it raises just a few consciousnesses in the U.S., as reading Rizal did for me.

PP: Are you working on other works by Rizal? Other Filipino authors?

HA: If the Noli sells well, I’m hoping that Penguin will want to add the Fili, which will then make the set in the U.S. Luis Francia and I have also been talking about the possibility of collaborating on translations and editions of Ninay and La Loba Negra, but that’s just a dream at this point. I’d love to do a new translation of Rizal’s edition of Sucesos de las islas filipinas and I’d really love to do a Rizal biography for the American readership at some point.

PP: Do you think not many second-generation Filipino Americans are that familiar with Rizal, and do you hope this book will change that?

HA: It’s hard for me to comment on how familiar second generation Filipino Americans are with Rizal. I think my main reason for this new edition was to share my fascination with Rizal as a writer and person - with as many people as possible, whoever they are.


Eric Gamalinda is the author of My Sad Republic, the novel that won the Philippine Centennial award in 1998. His latest collection of poetry, Amigo Warfare, is due for release in Spring 2007. His web site can be found at http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeslrlq/gamalinda/.