HARD TO IMAGINE

Benedict Anderson

Late 1950s - Philippine state began preparations for an elaborate centennial celebration of the birth
of Rizal on June 19, 1861.

- Since Rizal composed his two novels in Spanish, a prize competition for the best new
translation was sponsored.
- Among those stimulated by the competition to undertake a new translation was Leon Ma.
Guerrero, at that time the Philippine Ambassador to the Court of St. James

Key elements of Guerrero’s translation strategy

1. Demodernization
- It is a characteristic of Rizal’s bravura style that although the story of the Noli is set in the
(recent) past, and thus the dominant tense is the past, there are frequent modulations into
the present. Yet, every such present was systematically turned by Guerrero into the past.
- In every instance, the effect of Guerrero’s translations is not all to “update” Rizal’s novels,
but rather to push it deep into an antique past.

2. Exclusion of the Reader

- Throughout the novel, Rizal regularly turns and speaks to the reader. This technique sets
time aside and sucks the reader deep into the narrative, engaging her emotions, teasing
her curiosity and offering her malicious voyeuristic pleasures.
- However, in Guerrero’s translation, Rizal’s wittily insinuating voice was muffled, a silent
wall is set up between the author and the reader, and once again everything urgent and
contemporary in the text is dusted away in History.
- Rizal’s Spanish text is bejewelled with Tagalog words and expressions (e.g. bata,
salakot, timsim, paragos, sinigang). However, in Guerrero’s translations, they were not kept
in their original form. Similarly, the Tagalog exclamations naku!, aba!, and susmariosep!
were summarily eliminated.
- Once again, its elimination in the translation serves to distance rather than familiarize the
national hero.

3. Bowdlerization
- It is plain that Guerrero bowdlerized many passages which made him uncomfortable-
passages alluding to political or religious matters as well as swear words and references to
bodily functions.
- Rizal frequently has his rougher character swear, using the typographical convention “p
—“. This “p—“ may signal the mestizo expression putangina. Another, perhaps more likely,
referent to “puneta” .
- However, Guerrero either erased “p—“ completely or rendered it as “dammit” or, more
bravely, “damn you”.

4. Delocalization
- Almost all scenes in Noli are either set in “San Diego” (Calamba) and Manila. The Manila
chapters are replete with reference of, streets, churches, neighborhoods, cafes,
esplanades, theatre and so forth. The density of these places and placenames are among
the elements that give the reader the most vivid sense of being drawn deep inside the
novel.
- Guerrero, however, eliminated as much as 80% of these still-recognizable placenames.
- Furthermore, Rizal on occasion brings on stage the well-known music-hall and operetta
“stars” of his days. Guerrero eliminated all these stars representing them in an anonymous
collectivity as “the most renowned performers from Manila.”
- One would have thought that keeping Rizal’s names would have served to bring the
milieu of 1880s closer to modern readers rather than estranging them from it.
5. De-Europeanization
- Rizal was unusually a cultivated man, made familiar through his Jesuit schooling with
Latin and the world of antiquity. He knew Spanish, English, French, and German, as well as
a smattering of Italian and Hebrew. He also read widely in European literature. It is not
surprising, therefore, to find the Noli filled with untranslated classical tags, as well as
references to, and quotations from famous European masters.
- Guerrero’s approach to all these references was to eliminate them or naturalize them, as
far as possible.
- Since Guerrero prided himself on his anti-American nationalism, there is a curious irony
in all his translations. For the effect of his de-Europeanized translation is not to Filipinize
Rizal but rather to Americanize him.

6. Anachronism
- The most striking examples of anachronism all, in different ways, relate to the changing
“official” socio-political classification systems operating in the Philippines in the 1880s and
1950s.
- The problems accumulate if we look at the way at the way in which Rizal uses ethnic,
racial and political terminologies. On the whole, he sticks to the later Spanish-colonial
classifications: penisulares (Spaniards born in Spain), criollos (Spaniards born in the
Philippines or Latin America), mestizos (persons of mixed descent), sangleys and chinos
(Chinese born outside the Philippines and indios or naturales (“Indians” or indigenes of the
Philippine Islands). But sometimes he also uses the terms mestizo and criollo
inconsistently, so that they appear to overlap or even correspond. This inconsistency is the
characteristic of 1880s and 1890s, when political, cultural and social changes were making
problematic the older hierarchy. (Read the transition in the use of the word “F/filipino”, p.
246).
- Guerrero’s handling of these terms is exceptionally instructive. In the first place, filipina
(Rizal for some reason seldom used the male form of the adjective or noun), meaning a
mestiza or criolla is typically rendered as Filipina, meaning a female national of the
Philippines. Creoles virtually disappear while mestizo is most commonly rendered, Anglo-
Saxon racist style, as “half-breed.”