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(Second of three parts. Continued from Sunday December 28.)
Si Rizal, Nobelista, is a new appreciation of
the national hero as a writer, rather than as reformer. Rizal, the
writer, has suffered from the emphasis on his being a political
religious reformer. For example, the Americans—and American
translators of his novels—emphasized abuses of the Spanish
colonial masters and the friars. From their Protestant point of
view, they made much of his supposed masonry. As a writer, Rizal who
wrote during the Romantic period in Europe was also criticized on
the basis of Victorian standards by literary critics of the early
20th century.
The situation became worse when the Rizal law
was passed, making compulsory the teaching of Rizal’s biography
and writings. There was a rush to make deadlines and to be first in
the market for textbooks needed for the course. The hasty
translations resulted in condensations that preserved the political
content of his works and the haphazard treatment of the literary
aspects of his work. But this does not apply to the English
translations of the Noli and Fili by Maria Soledad Lacson-Locsin. In
his book, Almario paid tribute to the painstaking translation of the
novels by Ms. Lacson-Locsin, elder sister of former Manila City
Mayor Arsenio Locsin and mother of Ramon Magsaysay Journalism
Awardee, Raul Locsin.
Perhaps a forewarning from Ms. Locsin, might
help us appreciate what Rizal had in mind when he created his main
female characters:
“My introduction to the Noli was in its
original—as its author had written it. I belong to that generation
that came about at the turn of the 20th century when Spanish was
still the language. And, although the Americans had already been
here for a few years, the perceptions and mores of my childhood were
still largely influenced by the backwash of four centuries of
Castilian rule and Catholicism. Thus, although the thoughts of Rizal
were at that time radical, his manner of saying them, and what he
wanted to say were closer and more familiar to most of us encased in
the value traps of our generation.
“I have subsequently read other fine English
translations. Somehow I had the uneasy feeling that there was a
greater pursuit to depict the political and social thoughts of
Rizal’s time in the context of the translator’s milieu rather
than simply to tell the story of a different world in a different
time . . .” (italics supplied).
Characterization faiure
MARIA Clara is a failure in characterization
according to a late 20th century critic because Rizal was more
intent on attacking the abuses of friars rather than writing a
novel. Elliot Arensmayer, in an article in Philippine Fiction, a
collection of literary criticism from Philippine Studies of the
Ateneo de Manila University, writes:
“Rizal judges the evils wrought upon the
Philippines by pointing out the tortured and hypocritical acts of
the spiritual mentors of the Filipinos. Rizal is humorous, yet
profoundly bitter, on the subject. In one of the opening chapters of
Noli Me Tangere, Father Salvi, tormented by dark thoughts, stalks
Maria Clara and her friends as they paddle in a brook; ‘[their]
small, rosy feet playing in the water aroused strange sensations in
his starved body and familiar thoughts and fancies in his feverish
mind. Rizal may have felt the unnatural state of the celibate
Catholic clergy, especially as he sought to balance the natural
aspects of the Filipino countryside with the artifice of
Filipino-Hispanic society, but beyond that aspect he felt that the
friars’ lustful acts were a part of the hypocrisy and evil of
Spanish colonial rule. From the fact of Father Damaso’s fathering
of Maria Clara to the rape and suicide of Juli, sexuality runs as a
dark and recurrent theme in Rizal’s two novels and serves to bring
him closer to the Europe of his day.”
(This series on Rizal’s Maria Clara concludes
on Sunday January 11.)
opinion@manilatimes.net
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