Revolution Or Reformation? Jose Rizal As The Messiah We Don’t Know

Past the birth of The Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ, 25 December. Past the death of The Messiah of the Philippines – Jose Rizal, 30 December. To me, the message of the Messiah stays on. Except that we Filipinos have been arguing against Redemption since the 1890s.

A girl friend of long ago just asked me for a copy of my book (half of the cover is the red image above):indios bravos! Jose Rizal As Messiah Of The Redemption. She lives in Australia, although she is not complaining about the bush fires that apparently have engulfed all of Australia – or overwhelmed many of those who love Australia, whichever comes first.Conflagrations are never welcome and are difficult to contain.

No to Conflagration, yes to Configuration!

Yes, for years I have been thinking of a quite different Jose Rizal, National Hero of the Philippines. In 4 words, Rizal was “the first Filipino intellectual” (page 10 of my book).

I will now liken the Bush Fires of Australia to the injustices brought about by the Spanish conquerors on my people in the Philippines, except that those bush fires exhausted themselves by exhausting the combustible materials – like the Filipino revolutionaries wanting to control or conquer the Spaniards to stop their abuses of power over us natives and uneducated.

Rizal was the pacifist nobody knew, or understood. He opposed Andres Bonifacio’s Katipunan’s armed Revolution because he knew it would be bloody. And it was very. In fact, the Revolution consumed its own Father, Bonifacio. It was rivalry over power, and the upper class led by Emilio Aguinaldo won over the middle class. In any case, Aguinaldo or Bonifacio, I would not have joined.

I would have subscribed to what Rizal was preaching – Education. That would be what I have just called Configuration. If you want smooth change, but change nevertheless, you do not resort to fire to force the will of the people to be malleable – you resort to Configuration, to convince the mind to change the dominant colors of its views from Red to Yellow to White – that is to say, from Passion to Peace.

After all is said and done, of course I love most my own translation of the national hero’s valedictory poem written in Spanish and titled “Adios, Patria Adorada” – my July 2005 English translation is titled “Adios, Beloved Patria.”Adios is now of course an English word, and I wanted Patria because it is the name of a woman and my motherland Pilipinas is of course a female.

When I compared my English translation with those of others, from Charles Derbyshire’s “Farewell Dear Fatherland” (1911) to Frank Laubach’s “Fare Thee Well, Motherland I Adore” (1936) to Nick Joaquin’s “Land That I Love – Farewell!” (1941), to Encarnacion Alzona & Isidro Escare Abeto’s “Farewell, My Adored Land” (1961), I see that the most beloved translation of all, that of Derbyshire, does notfollow the a-b-a-a-b rhyme by the last word. Same with our beloved national writer Nick Joaquin.I know why – it is not easy to translate Rizal!@517