In case someone hasn't settled on a version yet, here is an excerpt from a 1997 review of Soledad Lacson-Locsin translation by Benedict Anderson in the
London Review of Books:
Quote:
Which brings us to the present translation, more or less timed for the centenary of Rizal’s execution. A few years ago, Doreen Fernandez, one of the Philippines’ most distinguished scholars, deeply disturbed by the corruption of Rizal’s texts, went in search of a compatriot linguistically capable of making a reliable translation. She eventually found one in Soledad Lacson-Locsin, an elderly upper-class woman born early enough in this century for Rizal’s Spanish – by no means the same as 1880s Madrid Spanish – to be second nature to her. The old lady completed new translations of both Noli Me Tangere and its even more savage 1891 sequel El Filibusterismo just before she died.
In most respects, it is a huge advance over previous translations, handsomely laid out and with enough footnotes to be helpful without being pettifogging. But the barbarous American influence is still there, to say nothing of the basic transformation of consciousness that created, for the first time, within a year or so of Rizal’s execution, a national idea of ‘the’ Filipino.
In Rizal’s novels the Spanish words filipina and filipino still mean what they had traditionally meant – i.e. creoles, people of ‘pure’ Spanish descent who were born in the Philippines. This stratum was, in accordance with traditional imperial practice, wedged in between peninsulares (native Spaniards) and mestizos, chinos and indios. The novels breathe nationalism of the classical sort, but this nationalism has to do with love of patria, not with race: ‘Filipino’ in the 20th-century ethno-racial sense never appears. But by 1898, when Apolinario Mabini began to write – two years after Rizal’s execution – the old meaning had vanished. Hence the fundamental difficulty of the present translation is that filipino/filipina almost always appear in the anachronistic form of Filipino/Filipina: for example, ‘el bello sexo está representado por españolas peninsulares y filipinas’ (‘the fair sex is represented by peninsular and creole Spanish women’) is rendered absurdly as ‘the fair sex being represented by Spanish peninsular ladies and Filipinas’.
The other problem is a flattening of the political and linguistic complexity of the original, no doubt because Mrs Lacson-Locsin was born just too late to have had an élite Spanish-era schooling. When Rizal had the racist Franciscan friar Padre Damaso say contemptuously, ‘cualquier bata de la escuela lo sabe,’ he mockingly inserted the Tagalog bata in place of the Spanish muchacho to show how years in the colony had unconsciously creolised the friar’s language. This effect disappears when Mrs Lacson-Locsin translates the words as ‘any schoolchild knows that.’ Rizal quotes three lines of the much-loved 19th-century Tagalog poet Francisco Balthazar in the original, without translating it into Spanish, to create the necessary intercultural jarring; but quoting the poem in the same language as the text surrounding it erases the effect. The ironical chapter heading ‘Tasio el loco ó el filósofo’ shrinks to ‘Tasio’, and one would not suspect that the chapter heading ‘A Good Day is Foretold by the Morning’ was originally in Italian. The translator also has difficulties with Rizal’s use of untranslated Latin.
There are a few prophets who are honoured in their own country, and José Rizal is among them. But the condition of this honour has for decades been his unavailability. Mrs Lacson-Locsin has changed this by giving the great man back his sad and seditious laughter. And it is badly needed – if one thinks of all those ‘social parasites: the pests or dregs which God in His infinite goodness created and very fondly breeds in Manila’.
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