72 Estrella, you saw what I was trying to do, thank you. (Trans. Note)
73 You’re welcome, but I have a migraine. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
74 So you were trying to convey disturbed puns in Raymundo’s text by creating your own? An anomalous though unavoidable process, as another jocose philosophical jack has pointed out: “to translate is error; to forgive, hogwash.” [Mürk, Practices XX] (Dr. Diwata Drake, the Maldives)
75 Give her a break, Dr. Diwata. You know she is still only in graduate school, though her linguistic talent is a mature genius. At least she puts in the effort—I give her the grade bueno, more or less B-. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
76 I am contingent. Shit is necessary. The ophthalmologist Rizal has nothing on Raymundo’s insight here. Recognizing shit as meaning—in which what seems “nothing” is “all,” and what is [empty] is [full]—is more revolutionary than going to war for mere country. Raymundo is a fine folk phenomenon. What do Filipinos call the wise fool—Juan Pusong? Juan Tamad? He has the blissful ignorance of the incidental sage: “. . . since every pen is no penis, and every id no idiot” [Mürk, Aphora XIV]. (Dr. Diwata Drake, the Maldives)
77 I think I’m on a roll. I think I’m getting it. This passage, dated January 20, 1872, the Cavite Mutiny, is a metaphor. “There’s a rock stuck in my gullet like a bullet. There’s a load in my cannon like a toad.” Raymundo refers to pent-up anger of the generation after Padre Burgos, rebel-priest executed in Cavite. As I noted, the Cavite Mutiny was a sorry excuse for a rebellion (slightly less pathetic than soldier mutinies that ring shopping malls with bombs at Christmas). However, its consequences were not insignificant. The Mutiny became an alibi for Spaniards to round up any suspected rebel—student, priest, or cochero—loitering on the street; they exiled merchants and marineros both. The aftermath was so traumatic to honest Filipinos everywhere that, for instance, Jose Rizal’s father forbade his children, all eleven of them, except Paciano who was already in hiding and Concha who was dead, to use the following words in conversation: “Cavite, Burgos, and ‘plibestiro’ [filibustero].” His father’s injunction scarred Rizal, ten years old at the time. For him, the Mutiny was a sacral wound (somewhere by the lumbar plexus). In 1887, he dedicated his first novel to “the three martyred Filipino priests” and in 1891 his second novel to filibusteros (seditionists) everywhere. Thus, born of Cavite’s trauma, Rizal’s novels sparked revolution. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
78 Dear Estrella. Excuse me. Ehem. “The load in my cannon”? A metaphor for the Cavite Mutiny? He’s talking about constipation. Could it be said that from the Cavite Mutiny Jose Rizal begat novels, while Raymundo Mata begat shit? Alternative meanings abound. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
79 Is this what they teach in—where are you from?—Kasilyas, Arkansas? Dumi-dumi, Delaware? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
80 Isn’t it enough that I had to translate this Chaucerian bawdry, its knee-jerk anticlerical tropes, and the triteness of its toilet jokes (any five-year-old can spout the bullet [bala] and cannon [kanyon] puns), but will you guys stop it already? (Trans. Note)
81 “Bulag-tas”: a blasphemous pun! According to Raymundo’s relatives, “Bulag” (Tagalog for blind—while in Waray bulag means split or apart) was the merciless pet name given to young Raymundo in Binakayan; it is not clear when his debility surfaced. Balagtas, on the other hand, was the foremost Tagalog poet of his time. Raymundo’s incontinent bluster is not becoming of a hero, shame on him! On the other hand, I myself cannot fail to blush at memories of a Catholic girlhood, when we pinned a number of mean names on a whole rosary of sorrowful classmates. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, against skinny Albino (a.k.a. Wild Gamao), sickly Miguel (a.k.a. Green Muhog: Greensnot), and, last but not least, my slow, deceased cousin Bibot, whom we just called Mongo, for short. Mea culpa. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
82 The original passage relies heavily on the Tagalog romance, Balagtas’s Florante at Laura, with which the future general is clearly familiar. A gestational text, that is, a text that has shaped national identity, the poem Florante at Laura fascinates even wayward souls. The sly and bad of heart ’neath a pure throne hides a fart—I was ashamed to translate his imbecility. However, Raymundo accomplishes what he sets out to do—he illustrates in sweating, panting rhyme the sweating, panting act—and while the onomatopeia is barbarous, the achievement is clear. (Trans. Note)
83 Francisco Balagtas (1835–1863) a.k.a. Baltazar was a Tagalog from Bulacan whose work was universally admired—by Spanish priests and Filipino readers alike. This is because of his work’s grand abstract symbolism, another term for I don’t get it! The damsel in distress plot of Florante at Laura could be seen as: subversive code for dark oppression (Las Islas Filipinas = Laura, the raped virgin, etc.), or entertaining Cervantean romance. Filipino komiks versions highlight its bondage themes. Rizal was a fan of his poetry (I prefer the komiks). Rizal quotes Balagtas fondly, as an acolyte might allude to a master, in his novels and in letters to Austrian ethnographer Blumentritt.
The balagtasan, on the other hand, had nothing to do with Balagtas. I recall the balagtasan contests during rainy patriotic holidays on the island of Leyte, that heedless land of the typhoon path, when the sinewy mists of the shadow-poetry jousts held sway. Ah, the balagtasan rhyming contests, which the exotic vowels of Tagalog, that foreigner’s tongue, easily accommodated, while consonants allowed for ample versification! The forbidding poetry competition had a vitality that did not measure up to the cunning of the eponymous lyricist. The rules of balagtasan were actually invented by a twentieth-century group of bored Filipino bards in a coffee shop. And yet it tells
