Entry #2
Miong, Idoy, and I46 went off to the banyan grove. We played the game Guess What the Branches Look Like, Tanga! Stumps of gnarls and tangled crosses. Corpses, scimitars, and rocking chairs.
Buta ka, buta! Butaka.47 48 49 50
We went to the river—our usual games. Tuktukan again—Miong’s favorite sport. God, Miong has huge eggs like a dinosaur’s, an auroch’s. Where does he get them? I lost at tuktukan again. My eggs are always too—weak. Then we went on a hunt for wild guavas. We shot all the green ones into the water. They made plopping noises like shit. Then Miong took off his pants under the sampaloc trees.51 52 We’re like that—nature is our arousal. We raise our butts in the air and watch insects flower under our shadow for hours. Shadow under our flower for hours.
I guess you could call it Eden.
I followed shit. I mean suit.53 54 55 56 57 Shitting is like yawning. Transitive compulsion, mathematical. Yawn and the world will yawn with you. Shit, ditto. I took off my shorts. Schoolboy style with the front buttons, no strings for me. Karsonsilyos58 59 are for old men and babies. When I got my pants with buttons and snapped one shut—it was better than holy communion! Now it’s kind of ordinary, a habit. I mourn the world’s changes, especially my own. I pulled my pants down.60
I sat silent. Still. What freedom. What colors and shapes and dragonflies like embroidered signatures on a handkerchief. What cool wind, dapping at my butt like a Saint Peter, fisher of men. I could not help but sing.61
Bird who has freedom to fly. Cage it and it cries. How much more for country so pretty. Who should not wish to go beyond? Pilipinas whom I love like a lady. Nest of my tears and sorrow. My goal, to see you really really free.
Entomological fulmination in immobile rectitude. Wings absorb my scientific stupor—thoracic addenda, luminous. Sputter and spiral, tiny hallucinations of God. I do not mean Bathala.62 Bathala not tending to hallucinate, rather empirical in his approach, sensory persuasions ruling. But church God has a certain unstable abstract mindset. Hallucination of church God, I mean, the vitrine splendor of insect wings.
To catch wings in commotion is impossible.63 64 Even as I watch, I change the facts of nature: there and not there, in that moment. I take down for my killing eye—the one that always sees—the half-moon-script of ladybugs. Their wings flap madly into odd stasis, into the optical fallacy of a lunar phase. Then, there’s the candor of dragonflies.65 Flimsy tracery of their wings, exposure of their slim volitions, pulse-maps available for all to see. I catch the radiances of flies. Bluebottle, greymottle, veinsottle—they have a filthy intimacy with the river’s shades of green. I snatch ants at their trade, watch spiders lay their traps. Ant equals bird plus pepper.66 67 Ant plus parrot equals penis. That is the declension of the word langgam. I hear mosquitoes speak bad things68 about me. ZZZ. ZZZ. Splat. That’s what they get. “Gossip sucks blood.” Note to killer’s eye:69 put that in your diary. Neat phrase. Thus, how do I? Maybe not Eden: but taking a shit is an education.70
What would King’s World do without shit? It is true that shit gives me power. Shit leads the world to me. Shit mesmerizes the Kingdom.71 72 73 74 But I’m modest enough to know that I am expendable. Shit is their cause. I mean, my rear is just means, no end. I am contingent. Shit is necessary.75 76 Philosophy hatches warmly in my bowels.
All this is cavil as you notice. I dilly and I dally. I zig and I zag. All prologue and introduction, tactical ploy, oiling up the barrels, testing the locks. There’s a rock stuck in my gullet like a bullet. There’s a load in my cannon like a toad. O jesusmaryjoseph mea culpa I disgraced your God, only two minutes ago. Mea culpa. O that those two minutes were back I intercede without blemish shame blame
oooh dammmmn. All-Powerful one, Friar Most Holy, Aggrieved and Aggravating. Salvame! 77 78 79 80
O Francisco Bulag-tas,81 salvame!
Sing, Raymundo, sing!
Inside and outside, my country in despair
Betrayals are reigning
Genius and goodness are thrown to the air
Sorrowful bowels irritating
Good deeds are hammered down
To the abyss of seas that moan
Talented faeces are off and blown
Buried without cornerstone
But the sly and bad of heart
’Neath a pure throne hides a fart
And to those with beastly art
Sweet incense is offered.
Sing, Raymundo, sing!
Omni—po—tent—ehem. Ehem. Ohoommmmmmm.
Raymundo:
Treason and evil take the lead
While goodness bends over
Bulag-tas:
Holy reason’s so hung over
43 This is, of course, the year of the Cavite Mutiny, vestigial phase of the revolution of 1896. The Calendar for Manileños corroborates the year. But the Calendar is unreliable (it has no bibliography); so I checked Agoncillo’s Revolt of the Masses. Hah! The exact date of the Mutiny. (Trans. Note)
44 On this date, fiesta fireworks went off near Manila, specifically Bilibid, a jail town visible at the time from Cavite (now obscured by miles of videoke bars and the diesel belch off Southern Luzon Expressway). Philippine-born soldiers (a.k.a. insulares) of the Spanish arsenal in Cavite mistook fiesta noise across Manila Bay as a signal for battle (but why?!), and so began a sorry motin. A bourgeois riot, similar to the Boston Tea Party instigated by American-born British merchants. Some historians call this “the first labor strike” in our history. I call it katangahan, yes, idiocy!—typical of the tragic absurdities that bedevil the province of Cavite. The mutiny ended up killing Gom-Bur-Za: three innocent priests of varying tendencies: Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora—their unmerited deaths are further proof of the errors of Cavite! (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Leyte)
45 Clue: three-syllable dvandva used as Katipunan password. Answer: What is Gom-Bur-Za??? And why was it a revolutionary password? Because Gom-Bur-Za mattered! No one (except certain invalid scholars mired in primitive spleen) disputes the importance of the Cavite revolt (just as few would portray the Easter Rising of 1916 only as some drunken Irish mayhem—though some have tried). The rise of native clergy threatened the Spanish orders. Of course, while Filipinos hated the clergy, they also wanted to become priests. A common schizophrenic polarity. The real problem, Estrella, is that Filipinos revere GOMBURZA as if each priest-martyr were equally marvelous. Whereas the facts of the Cavite Mutiny are a glorious case of dysrecognition and mis(taken)identification. Every Filipino should take a stab at interpreting their mess(age). In “The Garrulous Garrote: What GOMBURZA Says,” I point out that the priest-triad Gomez-Burgos-Zamora is, yes, a pancit mix, a noodle combination that will never cohere. The triplet priests, each of whom has nothing to do with the others, are a symbolic knot. Sure, Padre Mariano Gomez, aged saintly reformist, was by then retired and unjustly arrested. And Padre Jacinto Zamora was just a jugador, an unlucky gambler innocently caught in the scene of the mutiny. No wonder he lost his mind at the scaffold: he thought all he’d been doing during the mess around him was losing at cards! But it was above all Padre Jose Burgos, the Philippine-born prodigy, radical heresiarch—he was the genius provocateur, prelude to the overbearing genius, Rizal. His talents as orator, philosopher, and elegant blasphemer—the panoply of his skills—give lie to the notion of equality among this Holy Trinity. Father Burgos is the center of tragedy in the Cavite Mutiny. Thus, GOMBURZA was no salutary unity and singular heroic entity but, yes, a split identity, a bad yoke: sad fate of the signifier. But that does not lessen its importance. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Clyde, Ohio)
46 Future Katipunan generals Miong, a.k.a. Emilio Aguinaldo, later first president of the Republic, and Idoy, a.k.a. Candido Tria Tirona, were the memoirist’s earliest pals. Idoy was Raymundo’s cousin who died a hero in the First Phase of the Revolution—the war against Spain. “The river” is most probably in Binakayan, the barangay near which stood the house of Raymundo’s splenetic Spanish grandfather from Jaca. It is pleasant to consider the heroes enjoying a leisure moment by the Binakayan streams. This reminds me of my own times in my mother’s hometown when I learned to swim in Barugo’s river, my long, wet hair buoyant with freshwater minerals, stray Coca-Cola tanzans, and soft, calcareous sediment that I belatedly realized was, well, not hygienic. Those were the days. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
47 “Buta ka, buta!” Or did he say batuta ka, phallic symbol, meaning You are a police baton, a guarda civil’s tool? Butaka, I know, is a rocking chair. I failed to translate. (Trans. Query)
48 You are blind. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
49 Pardon? (Trans. Query)
50 Buta ka means: you are blind. In Waray. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
51 Curiously, in an episode not noted in these memoirs, the Caviteño Idoy, a.k.a. Candido Tria Tirona, died “under a sampaloc tree” [Calairo, Emmanuel, Cavite El Viejo, 133] attacked by Spaniards while he was “resting” [ibid.] after the bloody Battle of Binakayan. For this mortal disruption of his siesta, Idoy is called The Martyr of Binakayan. In revolutionary memoirs, “resting” was the second most common trope. (“Marching bands” is the fourth; “pintakasi,” special cockfights, runs a strong third.) Blood is barely mentioned. Spanish officers “rested,” troops “rested,” page after page is filled with “resting.” Not a single memoirist talks much about the experience of killing; but all talk about “rest.” The foregrounding of this pastoral scene mirrors the fantastic resting that lines revolutionary memoirs like hemp, as if events proceeded in narcotic haze. What is repressed? Death. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Redwood, California)
52 Dr. Voodoo, why talk of blood when it has not yet been shed? Isn’t it enough that one breathes through hoary tubes and has wires in the heart, and that the body performs its dance of vapors beyond the soul’s consent? Why destroy peace? The boys are sunbathing by the river: let them be. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
53 The pun on shit and suit is mine, but it matches the vulgarity of the original. Kitchen Spanish, as Rizal called Cavite’s chavacano (rough or vulgar) speech. Neither Spanish nor Tagalog. If I were to translate word for word Raymundo Mata’s language in these early passages, the reader would give up in despair. My facsimile of his playfulness possesses my errors, but I retain his allusiveness, his shifts in tone, and the somewhat lunatic energy of his observations, not to mention his puns. With at least three languages at every Filipino’s disposal, Raymundo Mata can pun at least seven ways in one phrase. That’s simple math. Thus far, I count five languages in the diary—Spanish, Latin, Tagalog, Waray, and Cavite-Chabacano. (Trans. Note)
54 In a letter to Ferdinand Blumentritt, his sedate Austrian mentor, Rizal did not seem to have much faith in the mixed-up vocabulary of the people of Cavite. Evidence of Rizal’s views of language rests on his correspondence with the Austrian (I discount for the moment the views in the Fili, being fiction). No one knows what kept the ethnologist Blumentritt at home. A sensitive malade imaginaire, he failed to meet Rizal anywhere in the hero’s mad dash around Europe in the 1880s: they met only once, in Blumentritt’s Austro-Hungarian Bohemia. Despite their heartrending bond, the friends spent only forty-eight hours, max, in each other’s company—and so it seems we have the European’s hypochondria to thank for the copious, homoerotic correspondence that survives. In one of those endless letters, Rizal made a matter-of-fact list of Filipino languages to satisfy Blumentritt’s scholarly questions. Next to Cavite, Rizal simply noted: español de cocina. (Trans. Note)
55 Homoerotic? Shame on you, Mimi C.! Just because you have the power of the pen in the modern age does not mean every word is a phallic orgy. Friendships between men in the nineteenth century produced affectionate, loving, fond epistles of, well, gayness, but that does not mean they were gay! May Rizal’s heterosexual hex vex you from Banahaw! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
56 Mimi C. did not say Rizal was gay. She said the letters were homoerotic. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Berlin, Germany)
57 Same difference. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
58 This trope, Filipino Spanish-ism for underpants (calzoncillos), recurs in the memoir. Filipinos liberally fucked with Spanish words: metonym, metathesis, etc. etc. (Trans. Note)
59 I used to put on my grandfather’s old pants just for fun; then my mom beat me up for my “wild ways.” Una jovencita varonil. I was a disgrace. One summer, my brothers wore odd loose trousers without buttons, we also called them karsonsilyos, when they turned twelve, special dispensation for their late circumcisions. They paraded their swathed, tortured bodies as if they were Cassius Clay or something, and I envied their loutish look—their rite of passage with their weird pants. On the other hand, they did look like a bunch of circus animals on display, strutting around town in their underwear, not indecent, but sad. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
60 If he got this orgasmic about buttons, what would he have done with zippers? “The anal stage” is a lurid misconception. Crude terminology based on finite contingencies (i.e., the human body) brought psychoanalytic thought to an impasse. We now understand that Freud’s theories are sound, but his words were disgusting. Raymundo here is in what has been pejoratively referred to by prurient, ignorant, non-Mürkian analysts as an anal crisis but which we in the twenty-first century realize is just one in a healthy continuum of linked, random, and eternal neuroses. “What are the three facts of the human condition?” an interviewer once asked Mürk in a Helsinki spa, where he spent time in the aftermath of that fateful Antibes Plenary of 1977. “I have three words for you,” the savant replied in the languor of Finnish sulfur, a tanned and floating oracle: “Neurosis. Neurosis. Neurosis.” (Dr. Diwata Drake, Bali, Indonesia)
61 The statement indicates that what follows (“Bird . . . really really free”) was set to music, perhaps a nursery rhyme. Many words were indecipherable; they seem smeared with some offal; plus, the handwriting shows this was written in a hurry. Decoding the lyrics, given the lacunae, I translated verbatim as much as I could. (Trans. Note)
62 Raymundo Mata invokes Bathala, the Tagalog name for God first mentioned by Chirino, a Jesuit chronicler of the 1600s. Rizal disputes the term Bathala three times in his letters to Blumentritt. (Some scholars, in this postmodern world that disrespects the dead, blaspheme that the hero could have been wrong.) Rizal queries the term again in his annotations of the history of the Philippines by an official living in Mexico, the Morga, in which through anguished footnotes the hero Rizal re-examines colonialism via a colonizer’s blurry lens. He is so earnest in the Morga, so angsty, so personally crazed with bitterness against the katsila, I like it better than the novels. Rizal writes to Blumentritt: “It was two years ago that I told [Pedro Paterno, Filipino expat in Madrid] I was surprised that no Tagalog knew about the word Bathala. He then showed me a dictionary [sic] . . . [Chirino’s] translation of the saying [bahala na ang May Kapal] is not correct.” Rizal was clearly annoyed by the Jesuit Chirino’s lapses: Rizal pre-cursed Orientalism and bore Edward Said’s pet peeves way before his time. An unbearable burden, if you ask me! Woe to the lonely avant-garde! If Rizal is correct in his argument, that Bathala was an error by the Chirino, yet one more form of Orientalist idiocy rather than a genuine indigenous term, then Raymundo Mata’s reference to Bathala is erudite—learned from school, not from shitting. I’m sure he’s hiding a revolutionary code somewhere—maybe “Bathala” is some kind of password? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
63 Revolutionary password?!!? I will explicate the above act for those undamaged by ideology’s miasma. Raymundo imitates his friend Miong and takes a shit by the river. As Raymundo shits he sings (and cribs from the anachronistic anthem Bayan Ko [c.1898], for no good reason—what was going on here, Ms. Translator?) and indulges in “feeble forays into zoologic insight” [Mürk, Mapping the Libido, vii]. Raymundo is observing insects (later he notes their colors with lyrical precision: “bluebottle, greymottle, veinsottle”) with minute attention that signifies a latent obsessive-compulsive schema in his psychic apparatus. This does not surprise me. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Vienna, Austria)
64 I would be the last person to question a renowned scholar such as Dr. Diwata, but I’d like to note here the hardship of translating texts—the terror, as she has once noted, of the linguistic abyss. Of course I make mistakes. All translators are confronted by territories for which they have no signposts, no cartographic schemes. As for this passage—it is a hypergraphic coil, a cacophone of contrapuntal tones, rich in its obscurity—I tried my best. Dr. Diwata should at least understand my situation before she throws stones, I mean footnotes! (Trans. Note)
65 Reminds me of my mom’s hometown, land of the morning shit. They had outhouses, no plumbing, so one had close encounters with nature. And on those road trips people took during my lost summers (when inland trucking had an entirely unmerited glamor), on Pantranco buses that passed through San Juanico Strait, the Bicol region, Southern Luzon—on those trips sometimes we had to improvise. I learned geology this way—the rocky grounds of Samar, volcanic grasslands of Bicolandia: the path to Manila littered by an organic gleam. I’m sorry, where was I? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
66 Exact meaning unknown, but the declension may go like this: langgam means ant in Tagalog but bird in Cebuano; pikoy means bird—specifically parrot—in Waray but penis in Cebuano; utan is vegetable in Cebuano but slang for penis in Cebuano and Hiligaynon; the word for pepper, sili, in Hiligaynon means, yes, penis in Waray: a delightful round-robin of phallic syllogisms going from language to language via natural ephemera. The polylingual Filipino has no other recourse but sophistication—and a dirty mind. (Trans. Note)
67 And the winner of the award for the dirtiest mind? Cebuanos! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
68 Aha. I see. The mosquitoes who “speak bad things” are the frailocracy, rabid eaters of nineteenth-century Filipino flesh. The imagery of killing mosquitoes (i.e., friars) is original—much better than the reigning insect trope—that Moth and the Flame fable that the young Rizal (and copycat Aguinaldo, too) kept invoking. Enough of that already! Sorry, Rizal—but that Moth story was boring. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
69 “The killer’s eye.” Is that a reference to “mind’s eye,” as in Wordsworth, or Shakespeare? Did Raymundo Mata read Wordsworth or did the translator? Mürk, in his reading of Freud, understood that language is at the heart of the self’s opacity. If it is impossible for us to say what we mean, how much more problematic is a translated country? If language defers meaning rather than provides it, what static arises in this bouillabaise? This text is exemplary in that it teaches us that we must always read with this axiom in mind—we will never know history, but in the meantime we can always blame the translator. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Vence, France)
70 I know there are haters out there (see above), but I enjoyed working on these passages. Raymundo is scientific yet lyrical, which academics, who do not understand poetry, fail to appreciate. His wordplay was fascinating to read and challenging to translate, for instance the image “half-moon-script” of ladybugs (“pagsusulatang mala-biyak-ng-buwan . . .”) to describe the flutter of their wings. I hope others enjoy my poor attempts at parlaying this energetically tactile yet philosophically absorbing section. (Trans. Note)
71 Ahh. I get it. Filosofong Tae. Heisenberg in the hornal. The dignity of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy is at stake here. There it is again: he says “King’s world.” Then he capitalizes Kingdom. Pun on his name Raymundo. “Rey-mundo.” King-world. Now I’m getting Mimi C.’s point, how she had to resolve the translator’s dilemma. Let me see. Hmm. Puwitic poet. Now I’m looking for the puns, the language shifts. Is “killer’s eye” a pun on his name: “Mata”? “Mata” means eye, in Tagalog, but he/she kills, in Spanish; as well as bush, as in mata de pelo (head of hair). Et cetera! Raymundo, the Mata-d’or—golden(killer)eye. Or Raymundo, Goldenhair-surpr-Eyes. Ad insanitum. Mimi C. is right: translating must have been a challenge. My head aches. I need to rest. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
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 you something about the vocal energy of our indolence. The balagtasan adept’s fame rests on marvelous oral improvisations. The poems in print, on the other hand, just sound like cold leftovers. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)