POST-SABBATICAL NOTES. 13 SEPT 2014. SATURDAY. N1. For Apo Aron De La Verdad and for Apo Al Mandane who saw the deceptions and ruses in the attribution of the poem Sa aking mga kababata to Jose Rizal. Source: A S Agcaoili, excerpt of a talk, Rizal and the Virtues of Diversity, delivered at the Knights of Rizal Conference, Honolulu, 2012; also published in Rizal and Nation Building (ed S Colmenares and R Liongson, 2013). The full paper is also found here: aurelioagcaoili.blogspot/2014/09/the-question-of-plural-and-question-of.html. And here comes Jose Rizal, with his declaration, each time misused by rabid nationalists and equally rabid and narrow-minded leftists: “And taong di magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit pa sa hayop at malansang isda.” (“Those who do not love their own language are likened to a rotten fish.”) That declaration, coming purportedly from his poem written when he young, “Sa Aking mga Kababata” (“To My Peers”), translates freely as “The person who does not love his own language is worse than an animal, or a rotten fish.” There are two problems here: one, a misuse of this phrase when it refers to Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino as the national language, and two, an attribution of the same poem to Rizal as the author when internal and external evidences point another as a possible author and cannot be Rizal. In either way, we are using a wrong evidence to prop up an idea that justifies the turning into the Philippines as a single-language speaking country. WPH/
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 19:58:41 +0000
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