2407 HIST 2: LIFE AND WORKS OF DR JOSE RIZAL

0930-1030 TTHS H701

GROUP 1: RATING SHEET

MEMBERS TOPIC CONTENT DELIVERY

GUIRNALDA, Yancy Klea B. Jose Rizal of a National Literature by

Resil B. Mojares

Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism,

HEBRES, Jennifer Joy B. Southeast Asia and the World by
Benedict Anderson

SEPNIO, Rachelle Joyce T. Necessary Fiction: Philippine Literature

and the Nation 1946- 1980

COMMENTS:
 Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World
Benedict Anderson

Spectre of comparisons- this book is a collection of essays that apparently focuses on Southeast Asia,
but its observation range widely.

 Drawn from the novel Noli Me Tangere by the National Hero Jose Rizal which is originally
written in Spanish as : “el demonio de las comparaciones”
 The book incredibly rewarding. Apart from its content, and what it has to say about identity and
nationality, it is wonderful example of different strategies that can be used to write history, and
especially how to use highly specific case studies to make far reaching general points.

OUTLINE:

 Jose Protasio Rizal Mercado y Realonda

 1950s – Preparation for centennial celebration of the birth of Dr. Jose Rizal (June 19, 1861)
 Who is Rizal?
o Poet
o Historian
o Scientist
o Journalist
o Linguist
o Satirist
o Political activist
o Novelist

 Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo – chefs d’oeurve of the Philippine Literature.

 chefs d’oeurve- a masterpiece especially in art and literature.

 1899-1942- American colonial regime had by the end wiped out the local use of Spanish except
in the few rich mestizo and creole families
 1950s- Rizal’s 2 novels had become inaccessible
 Mid 1950s- Rizal had become the center of bitter political controversy.
 The Church was put in a difficult spot. The chief of the villain of both novels are clerics:
o Brutal Franciscan
o Lascivious Dominicans
o Power-hungry Jesuits
 Brutal- cruel ; Lascivious – lusty, dirty; Power- hungry – having strong desire of power
 1915-1982- 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.

“ I will have more to say about Guerrero later. It is enough to note here that his fluent translations
were very successful, and quickly supplanted all older versions in high- School and university libraries”.

 As Doreen Fernandez noted, they have become “the only translations anybody reads now”.
Note:

- Guerrero decided only at the last minute not to enter his translations in the competition. He was
frank enough to say that the reason was money. The Price was worth only 10,000 pesos, and he
would have had to surrender the copyright. He sold installment right in the Philippine to the
Manila times, and the foreign rights to Longmans, the well-known London publishing company.
 Needed to learn to read Spanish and decide to teach him by reading Noli Me Tangere and the El
Filibusterismo in the original.
 Guerreros version was systematically distorted in the most interesting ways

The Seven headings/rubrics that is in the book:

1. DEMODERNIZATION
 It is characteristics of Rizal’s bravura style that although the st
 ory of Noli is set in the past and thus the dominanmt tense is the past
 Every such present was systematically turned by Guerrero in the past
o Example: on the opening page of Rizal
 “Cual una sacudida electrica corrio la noticia en el mundo de los parasitos,
moscas o colados que Dios crio en su infinita bondad, y tan carinosamente
multiplica en Manila”
 Translation:
“Like an electric shock the news ran through the world of parasites, spongers,
and gate crashers whom God created in his infinite goodness, and so
affectionately multiplies in Manila”
- However Guerrero rendered the final phrase as “whom God, in his infinite
wisdom, had created and so fondly multiplied in Manila
 In every instance the effect of Guerrero’s alterations is not all to “update” Rizals novel, but
rather to push it deep into an antique past. It is as if he wished to reassure himself that God no
longer fondly multiplies parasites and spongers in Manila, and has finally become no less
demanding of justice than is humanity.

2. EXCLUSION OF THE READER

 Throughout the novel of Rizal regularly turns and speaks to the reader. As if author and
reader were ghosts or angel, they penetrate invisibly.
 A simple example is the transition between a scene where Father Damaso pushes Don
Santiago into the latter’s study for a secret confabulation and the following scene which
features some lively scheming between two Dominicans
o “Cpn. Tiago se puso inquieto, perdio el uso de la palabra, pero obedecio ysiguio
detras del colossal sacerdote, que cerro detras de si la puerta. Mientras conferencians
en secreto averiguemos que se ha hecho de Fr. Sibyla
o Translation:
 “Captain Tiago became uneasy and lost his tongue, but obeyed and followed after the
colossal priest, who locked the door behind him. While they are conferring in secret,
let us find out what has happened to Fr. Sibyla.
o Guerrero’s version goes:
“He made Captain Tiago so uneasy he was unable to reply, and obediently followed
the burly priest who closed the door behind them. Meantime, in another part of the
city the scholarly Dominican, Father Sibyla, had left his parish house…”
 At a stroke Rizal’s wittily insinuating voice is muffled, a silent wall is set up between author
and reader, and once again, everything urgent and contemporary in the text is dusted away
into History
 It is not simply that Guerrero probably felt uncomfortable with the prospect that even in an
independent Philippines the inhabitants might still be classified and valued by their shells.
 Noli was written to inspire the nationalism of Filipino youth, and for the Filipino people!

3. EXCISION OF TAGALOG
 Rizal’s Spanish text is bejeweled with tagalog words and expressions
 Sometimes they are deployed for sheer comic effect, to deepen the readers’ sense of the
conflicts between peninsular Spaniards, creoles, mestizos, and indios.
 Most often they simply reflect, as did the Anglo-Indian that developed in Victorian times, the
casual penetration of the imperial vernacular by local languages
o Examples:
 Salakot – local straw hat
 Timsim – kerosene lamp
 Paragos- sled
 Sinigang- local food
It would be immediately familiar to young Filipino readers
 The translation stance is especially strange in that one can hardly imagine even the most
Americanized Filipinos of the early 1960s speaking to each other of “native hats” and native
dishes”
 “Taglish” constant interchange and fusion between Tagalog and English.
o The mestizo language of the original Noli would surely have seemed agreeably
“contemporary”
o Its elimination in the translation serves to distance rather than familiarize the
national hero
4. BOWDLERIZATION
 Guerrero bowdlerization many passages which made him uncomfortable- passages which
made him uncomfortable. Passages alludging to political or religious matters.
o Example: discusses the superstitious veneration of Captain Tiago for certain
religious images
“No habla ell visto por sus proprios ojitos a los Cristos todos en el sermon de las
Siete Palabras mover y doblar la cabeza a compass y tres veces, provocando el
ilanto y los gritos de todas las mujeres y almas sensibles destinadas al cielo?
Mas? Nosotros miosmos hemos visto al predicador ensenar al public, en el
momento del descenso de la cruz, un panuelo manchado de sangre, e ibamos ya a
 ilorar piadosamente, cuando, para desgracia de nuestra alma, nos aseguro un
sacristan que aquello era broma… era la sangre de una gallina, asada y comida
incontinenti apesar de ser Viernes santo… y el sacristan estab grueso.
o Translation: roughly
“Had he not seen with his own piggy eyes, during the sermon on Jesus’s Seven
Last Words, all the images of Christ thrice moving and bending their heads in
unison provoking to tears and shrieks all the women and sensitive souls destine
for Heaven? We have ourselves observed a preacher displaying to the public, at
the moment of the Descent from the Cross, a blood stained handkerchief… it was
a blood of he, roasted and devoured instance, despite its being Good Friday…
and the sacristan was fat.
o Guerreros translation offered simply:
“Had he not seen with his own little eyes, the images of Christ, during the Good
Friday sermons on the Seven Last Words, thrice raising and hanging their heads
in unison, moving to tears and pious exclamations all women in church and
indeed all sensitive souls destined for salvations?”
 It seems that it is one thing for the Chinese mestizo’s credulity to be ridiculed, but quite
another to permit the First Filipino, in his own sarcastic voice.
 Rizal frequently has his rougher characters swear, using the typographical convention “P---“
may signal the mestizo expression putangina (Spanish “puta- whore” and Tagalog “inay-
mother”)- your mother is a whore. This curse word one hears dozens of times every day on
Manila’s streets and it is certainly one that “every schoolboy knows.

5. DELOCALIZATION
 Almost all the scenes in the Noli are set either in “San Diego” or in Manila.
 The Manila chapters replete with references to, and descriptions of, streets, churches,
neighbourhoods, café 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
 It is therefore odd that Guerrero eliminated as much as 80% of the still- recognizable
placenames. It would be quite easy, using the original Spanish text, to follow Rizal’s heroes
and villains as they moved around the metropolis, but almost impossible if one employs
Guerrero’s American version.
 Futhermore, Rizals on occasions brings on stage the well-known music hall and operetta
“stars’ of his day: Chananay, Yeyeng, Marianito, Carvajal. They do not need explaining since
every 1880s reader would automatically know who they were
-Guerrero eliminated all these stars, representing them in anonymous collectivity as “the
most renowned performers from Manila”
-was certainly widely enough read to know that references to now forgotten showbiz
celebrities in the novels of Balzac, Tolstoy, and Proust in no way impede but rather
accentuate the immediacy and verisimilitude of the worlds they present their readers.
 One would have thought that keeping Rizal’s name would have served to bring the milieu of
the 1880s closer to modern readers rather than estranging them from it.
6. DE- EUROPEANIZATION
 Rizal was an unusually cultivated man, made familiar through his Jesuits schooling with
Latin and the world of antiquity.
 Languages that Rizals Know:
o Spanish
o English
o French
o German
o Italian
o 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
reference to and quotations from European masters.
 Guerrero’s approach to all these references was to eliminate them or to naturalize them, as far
as possible.
o Example: conspirational discussion between two Dominican Friar, Rizal has the older
one say
“Temo que no estemos empezando a bajar: Quos vult perdere Jupiter dementant
prius”
o Translation:
“I fear lest we may be beginning to decline. Whom Jupiter wishes to destroy he first
makes mad”
-Rizal does not translate the Latin because he assumes his readers will understand his
tag.
-Guerrero eliminated both Latin and the barb, and translated it as “Whom God would
destroy, He first make mad”
 The result is the erasure of Rizal’s civilized laughter.
 There is a curios irony, since Guerrero, as we shall see, prided himself on his anti- American
nationalism. For the effect of his de- Europeanization translation is not to Filipinized Rizal,
but rather to Americanize him.

7. ANACHRONISM
 Longest essay that was written in the book.
 The most striking examples of anachronism all, in different ways, relate to the changing
“official” social political classification systems operating in the Philippines in the 1880s and
1950s.
o Example:
“embraza un escudo griego y blande en la diestra un kris joloano”
o Translation:
“holds a Greek shield on his arm and brandishes in his right hand a Jolonese kris”
o Guerreros version:
“carried a Greek shield on one arm and with the other wielded a Malay Kris”
 Aside from the characteristic distancing shift of tenses, the obvious metamorphosis is of
“Jolonese kris” into “Malay kris”
-Rizal saw no need to italicize “kris” a word known to everyone in the archipelago, then and
now. Guerreros italization make kris stick out as some kind of “foreign” word/object needing
to be explained to young Filipinos. “Malay” is odder.
- Read one way it could refer to the peoples of Malaysia and Indonesia, who indeed also
manufacture krises; such a reading would accentuate the foreigners of the weapon.
 Two general lines of investigation suggest themselves, to be followed up at different levels,
but by no means necessarily in conflict with each other. Both invites us from contrasting
perspective, to think about the passing of political time.
 This approach helps us took at familiar things and realize just how strange and
constructed, even how revolutionary, they actually are.
 In his observation on Southeast Asia societies, spectre, about how for example:
Manila is changed when it can no longer be seen through a comparison with the
European capitals, and how, more broadly, nationalism is produced by the
process of increasing global connection
 Contains theoretical and historical consideration about nationalism, national literature and
memory, modernization and so on.
 Anderson shuns the rigidity of comparative politics by effortless transporting the reader
from one locale to another, from one language to another, and from one text to another in
trying not only to put Southeast Asia in the world, but also the world in Southeast Asia.
 He takes up the large issues of universal grammars of nationalism and ethnicity, the
peculiarity of nationalist imagery as replicas without originals, and the mutations of
nationalism in an age of mass global migrations and instant electronic communication.
 He made us realize that even without digital communication technologies, Rizal’s
execution was world news and had global ramification.