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Introduction
One of the most
famous texts posted on this website is the patriotic rallying call "Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog",
which historians generally accept was written by Andres Bonifacio for Kalayaan,
the Katipunan newspaper. The sole
dissentient from this consensus has been Glenn May, who argues in his book Inventing a Hero that the Tagalog text known to
generations of Filipino students was most probably crafted not by Bonifacio in
1896 but by Jose P. Santos, the historian who first published the text in the
1930s. May alleges, in effect, that Santos translated the
article back into Tagalog from a previously published Spanish or English
translation and then falsely presented his retranslation as the
original.
This note examines May’s case in detail, demonstrates that his
allegation is baseless, and establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the text
is authentic.
The
source of the Tagalog text
Jose P. Santos reproduced
the Tagalog text of “Ang Dapat Mabatid” in a brief biography of Bonifacio he
published in 1935 under the title Si
Andres Bonifacio at ang Himagsikan.[1] He had copied the text from
the original, he wrote, “without making
any changes, even in the manner and style of the writing” (“sinipi ko ng walang anumang pagbabago, maging sa ayos
at paraan ng pagkakasulat.”)[2]
May’s first objection or suspicion is that Santos was
“uninformative” about where the original was located.[3] But he is wrong to suggest that there was
any secret or mystery as to the whereabouts of the text. Its location was made known to the readers
of Si Andres
Bonifacio at ang Himagsikan very
forthrightly via the tributes to Santos
printed at the end of the booklet. “As
regards facsimiles, records and other documents of the revolution,” one
plaudit reads, “we can say without doubt that the collection of Pepe Santos
currently has no equal. It is also to
Pepe Santos’s credit that he alone in the whole world is taking special care
of the original documents, of many handwritten letters of Andres Bonifacio
and Emilio Jacinto, which cannot be found or seen anywhere else.”[4] Santos,
another testimonial relates, had inherited “all the documents” in his
collection pertaining to Bonifacio and Jacinto from his father, the renowned
historian Epifanio de los Santos.[5] We know, in short, where the text was in
1935, and we know how Jose P. Santos had acquired it.
May’s next worry is that Santos did not describe the exact nature of
the original, that he neglected to say whether he had copied the text from a
complete copy of Kalayaan or from a separate manuscript, perhaps from
a handwritten draft.[6] If Santos
did possess a copy of Kalayaan, May asks, why did he not reproduce the
original Tagalog text of the contributions attributed to Emilio Jacinto – “Sa
mga Kababayan” and “Pahayag” - when he published a collection of Jacinto’s
writings?[7]
This is a good question, but it well-nigh supplies
its own answer. The answer, almost
certainly, is that Santos
did not have a printed copy of Kalayaan in its entirety. He might have had just some pages of the
actual newspaper, but it is much more likely that he had just some of the
individual contributions, probably in the form of handwritten manuscripts on
loose sheets of paper. He hinted as
much himself. In his book on Jacinto,
he informed his readers that he was unable to reproduce the piece entitled
“Sa mga Kababayan” because “the first pages” of the copy in his safekeeping
were missing.[8] Since the piece is quite brief, it is
unlikely that any printed version could have occupied more than a couple of
pages, whereas a handwritten copy on small sheets of paper might well have
done. In his work on Bonifacio,
similarly, Santos noted that he had been obliged to insert question marks in
his transcription of the poem “Pagibig sa Tinubuang Bayan” at points where
the original text was illegible, which again suggests he was working with a
handwritten rather than a typeset copy.[9]
Circumstantial evidence can also be drawn from the
writings of Santos’s
father. He too, like his son after
him, wrote brief biographies of both Bonifacio and Jacinto and in each
reproduced a number of their works, albeit in his case in Spanish translation
rather than in the original Tagalog.[10] What is pertinent here is that in his 1917
work on Bonifacio he included his own translations of “Ang Dapat Mabatid” and
“Pagibig sa Tinubuang Bayan”, but in his 1918 biography of Jacinto he did not
publish his own translations of either “Sa mga Kababayan” or “Pahayag”. He merely made mention of “Sa mga
Kababayan” and reproduced a portion of the earlier translation of “Pahayag”
made by Juan Caro y Mora.[11] If copies of those two articles had been
available to him, to echo May’s valid point, he surely would have published
his own translations. Epifanio de los Santos, in other words,
translated the same two Kalayaan pieces whose Tagalog texts his son
transcribed two decades later, and did not translate the same two Kalayaan
pieces that his son did not transcribe.
It is therefore unlikely that Epifanio de los Santos ever owned (or
even copied) Kalayaan in its entirety, and it is therefore much more
likely that the collection he bequeathed to his son included “Ang Dapat
Mabatid” and “Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Bayan” in the form of loose, probably
handwritten, manuscripts.
The
possibility of discrepant Tagalog texts
Whatever its exact form, the text of “Ang Dapat Mabatid”
that Epifanio de los Santos
acquired and translated was obviously in Tagalog. He did possess the Tagalog text in some
form. When he died in 1928, the
document passed to his son and when he, Jose P. Santos, came to write Si
Andres Bonifacio at ang Himagsikan in 1935, it might be presumed, he
still had the original in his possession and was able to copy it, as he said
he did. What conceivable reason, then,
could he have had, as Glenn May suspects, for fashioning a fresh Tagalog
text, for laboriously retranslating the piece back into Tagalog from the
Spanish?
Sometimes, though, the improbable happens. Amongst the Katipunan documents Santos inherited from
his father were four letters Bonifacio wrote to Jacinto, and when he came to
write a further biography of Bonifacio in 1948, he incorporated
retranslations of these letters in his manuscript rather than the authentic
texts.[12] He did not, so far as is known, state that
the letters had been copied from the originals, and it is only fair to note
also that the work was unpublished. It
may have been unedited, or at least unpolished. Given the passage of time and the
disruption of war, there is a stronger chance that Santos’s collection had become scattered by
1948, and items mislaid.
For some reason, in any event, the letters were
retranslated, and in these circumstances the possibility that the text of
“Ang Dapat Mabatid” likewise got retranslated cannot be dismissed until we
have considered the remainder of May’s case.
May always takes care, moreover, to qualify his arguments with words
like “probably”. He never claims to be
certain the Tagalog text is a retranslation, or that Jose P. Santos was the
perpetrator. It is possible, he would
say, that the Tagalog text possessed by Epifanio de los Santos was itself inauthentic, and had been
fabricated before Jose P. Santos was even born. The text’s disputed authenticity,
therefore, needs to be seen as a separate issue from the imputation of Santos’s culpability,
even though the two are liable to get intertwined. In an effort to lessen the entanglement in
the discussion that follows, the shorthand employed for “the Tagalog text
published by Santos in 1935” will not be “the Santos text” but “the
extant text”.
If, as deduced above, Jose P. Santos copied “Ang
Dapat Mabatid” from a handwritten manuscript, it follows that the extant text
might not be exactly the same as that printed in Kalayaan. A few words might have been changed, and a
few added or deleted, before it was set in type.
Glenn May, however, believes the differences between
the as-yet-untraced text printed in Kalayaan
and the extant text to be far greater.
The first was written in 1896, but the second, he maintains, was
“probably” fashioned by Santos
in the 1930s from a Spanish or English translation. In this process of retranslation, May
contends, Santos
preserved “the basic ideas” of the original but “it is
not at all likely that the vocabulary, images, symbols, metaphors and the
like…survived in anything like their original form. Some of them may even have undergone a
radical transformation.”[13]
The
Spanish translation of Juan Caro y Mora
May attempts to
demonstrate that the extant text is substantially different from the lost Kalayaan text by comparing it to the Spanish translation made
by Juan Caro y Mora in 1896 or 1897, a translation that was undisputedly made
from a printed copy of Kalayaan. [14] If he can show that this
translation is incompatible with the extant text, he believes, the only
logical conclusion must be that the extant text is not authentic. To illustrate his case, he focuses on the points at which he believes
the Spanish and Tagalog texts diverge most markedly, and to gauge the weight
of his argument it is necessary to address in turn
each of the three specific examples he puts forward.
May first points
to what he sees as an incongruity between the noun bienestar in the
translation by Caro y Mora and kaguinhawahan in the Tagalog text.[15] Bienestar means “well-being” with connotations
of “peace of mind and tranquility”, whereas kaguinhawahan, he says, could be translated as
“prosperity” but also connotes “a general ease of life [and] relief
from pain, sickness or difficulties”. These distinctions seem rather fine, but
he seems to be saying that bienestar primarily means “mental comfort”
whereas kaguinhawahan primarily means “material and physical
comfort”. But translation, as he well
knows, is a difficult, subjective and imprecise art, and one translator’s
choice of words and sentence constructions will always be different from
another’s. The question to be asked is
not whether bienestar is the ideal word to convey the meaning of kaguinhawahan
in that particular context, but whether it was a plausible or likely choice
for Caro y Mora to have made when he set about translating “Ang Dapat
Mabatid” in 1896 or 1897. We must
imagine him sitting at his desk, a copy of Kalayaan spread out before
him, a couple of dictionaries to hand.
Let us suppose he is pondering how best to render the word kaguinhawahan
and that he turns first to the Vocabulario de la lengua tagala of Juan
de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlucar. It
offers, of course, a variety of equivalents for the word, its root and its
relations and, contrary to May’s nice distinctions, bienestar is
indeed among them.[16] Caro y Mora thinks bienestar is an
apt choice, but checks also to see what Pedro Serrano-Laktaw’s more
contemporary Diccionario Hispano-tagalog advises. He looks up the entry for bienestar
and finds the confirmation he is seeking: “Kalagayang mabuti nang
pagkabuhay; kaginhawahan.”[17]
May’s second
illustration of the supposed incongruence between the Caro y Mora translation
and the Tagalog text published by Santos
can be readily subjected to the same scrutiny. There are two phrases in the Spanish
translation that include the word justicia - “el día de justicia” and “enseña
la justicia”. These are not
suitable equivalents, May argues, for the Tagalog phrases to be found at the
corresponding points in the extant text - “ang araw ng katuiran” and “ytinuturo
ng katuiran”. Caro y Mora’s words,
he contends, “do not come close to the meaning of the Tagalog ones“. So here again, he concludes, the extant
text must be different from the authentic Kalayaan text. It seems unlikely,” he writes, “that the
word katwiran (katuiran) was actually in the Tagalog original, for, had it been,
the most logical translation would have been razón.”[18] But again his point is confounded by the
dictionaries that Caro y Mora might have consulted, which both confirm justicia
as a valid option. The Vocabulario
advises that “catouiran” could be translated as razón, but
that it also connotes “justicia conforme á la razón”.[19]
Serrano-Laktaw’s Diccionario, similarly, says that “katowiran” could
be translated as either razón or justicia.[20]
The third
incongruity May perceives between the Caro y Mora translation and Tagalog
text is a word “missing”. In the
Tagalog text the sentence in question reads “Ngayon sa lahat ng ito’y ano
ang mga guinawa nating paggugugol nakikitang kaguinhawahang ibinigay sa ating
Bayan?” This might be
translated as “Now, after all this, after everything we have done,
what prosperity have we seen bestowed upon our Country?”[21]
But the Caro y Mora translation, May observes, makes no reference to
“prosperity” at all: “Ahora, después de todo esto, qué es los
que hemos recibido de ella por tanto gasto que sea digno de mencionarse?”
(“Now, after all this, is there anything worth mentioning that we have
received from her [Spain]
in return for such expense?”) “In
light of that Spanish version of the text,” May asks rhetorically, “how
likely is it that the real original would have included the root word ginhawa?”[22]
Nobody, of course,
can know why the Spanish translation contains no equivalent for kaguinhawahan. It is possible that at this precise point
there is a divergence between the Tagalog text copied by Santos and the version printed in Kalayaan. It is possible that Caro y Mora made a
slip. Much more likely, Caro y Mora
simply decided not to translate kaguinhawahan
because he felt he could convey the sense of the sentence without offering a
direct equivalent. Strangely, though,
none of these possibilities is mentioned by May.
When he suggests
that kaguinhawahan could not be rendered as bienestar, in sum,
or that justicia “does not come close to the meaning” of katuiran,
May is just plain wrong. When he
speculates that a single word “missing” from the translation suggests it was
absent too from the Kalayaan text, he is unconvincing. Rather than explore a variety of possible
explanations for the mismatches he perceives between the Caro y Mora and the
Tagalog texts, he offers only one explanation, and in truth it seems
predetermined. He never wonders
whether the extant text might have been different from the final Kalayaan text,
but nevertheless still be authentic because it was written in 1896 and was a
draft of the Kalayaan text. He
never allows that the Caro y Mora translation might in places be somewhat
loose and free. So deep is his
distrust of Jose P. Santos, so entrenched his suspicions, that he jumps
straightaway to the conclusion that each mismatch makes the extant text more
and more problematic, more and more likely to have been fabricated by Santos
himself in the 1930s.
The
Spanish translation of Epifanio de los Santos
The identification
of disparities between the Spanish of Caro y Mora and the Tagalog of the
extant text is the closest that May gets, so far as “Ang Dapat Mabatid” is
concerned, to submitting any hard evidence against Santos.
The issue of translation is central to his case. It is strange, then, that he did not take
time to take an equally close look at the second well-known translation of
“Ang Dapat Mabatid” into Spanish, the translation published by Epifanio de
los Santos in
1917. [23]
May does mention
this translation fleetingly, noting that it differs “so substantially” from
Caro y Mora’s earlier version “that we might justifiably wonder if [Epifanio
de los Santos]
had consulted [Caro y Mora’s version] at all.”[24]
It would surely
have been pertinent, then, for May to discuss some of these substantial
differences, and to examine in particular whether they shed any light on the
disparities he has discerned between the Caro y Mora translation and the
Tagalog text published by Jose P. Santos.
Had he done so,
what would he have found? De los Santos’s translation, he
would have found, offers precisely the Spanish equivalents that he, May,
believes to be so significantly absent in Caro y Mora’s translation. May, it will be recalled, suggests that the
word bienestar (well-being) was unlikely to have been chosen by Caro y
Mora as an equivalent for kaguinhawahan (prosperity; material and
physical comfort). De los Santos, at the
equivalent point in the text, does indeed employ the word prosperidad. At the points where May suggests that the
phrases “el sol de la razón” and “enseña la razón” would match
the extant text better than Caro y Mora’s “el día de justicia” and “enseña
el justicia”, Epifanio de los Santos
does indeed employ those exact phrases.
And where Caro y Mora omitted any direct equivalent for the word kaguinhawahan,
de los Santos
supplies the Spanish term desahogo (material comfort).[25]
It might therefore
be argued that at the three specific points May has highlighted, Epifanio de
los Santos’s
translation happens to be a closer match for the Tagalog text later published
by his son, Jose P. Santos, than Caro y Mora’s translation. “In which case,” May might say, “it seems
more likely that Jose P. Santos fabricated the Tagalog text using his
father’s translation rather than Juan Caro y Mora’s.”
But it doesn’t,
because at other points Caro y Mora’s translation is demonstrably the closer
match. In the first paragraph of the
Tagalog text, for example, there is a reference to a time when the Spaniards
had “not yet” (“hindi pa”) arrived in the Islands. Caro
y Mora offers the precise equivalent “no aun”, but de los Santos reworks the
phrase to read “prior to” (“con anterioridad”) the arrival of the
Spaniards. Into a later paragraph de
los Santos
inserts an exclamatory “¡ay!”, an embellishment that Caro y Mora did
not feel necessary. The Tagalog text
calls on patriots to spread the “mga mahal at dakilang aral”, a phrase
which Caro y Mora renders in full as “nobles y grandes doctrinas,” but
which de los Santos abbreviates to “la buena nueva” (“good
news”). And the final exhortation in
the Tagalog text, “ating idilat ang bulag na kaisipan,” is rendered
scrupulously by Caro y Mora as “abramos los ojos de nuestro ciego
entendimiento” (“open the eyes of our blind intellects [singular?]”)
whereas de los Santos
introduces a metaphor of dispersing mists – “disipemos las nieblas de
nuestra inteligencia.”
If
the 1897 Spanish translation matches the Tagalog text better in some places
and the 1917 Spanish translation matches it better in others, the likelihood
surely increases that the Tagalog text predates both, and was indeed the
source of both. The alternative
hypothesis, that Jose P. Santos or someone else picked and mixed from the two
translations when they fabricated the Tagalog text at a later date, seems
highly improbable. It becomes still
more far-fetched when one looks again at the Tagalog text and finds words and
phrases for which equivalents do not appear in either of the Spanish
translations. Caro y Mora’s
translation, even in the title, refers to the native inhabitants of the Islands as “los
indios”. De los Santos’s translation refers to “los Filipinos”, and later to “los isleños”. But the term employed in the Tagalog text,
as one would expect in a Katipunan document, is “ang mga Tagalog”. Both
translations, similarly, refer to the country namelessly as “las islas”, whereas the term found in
the Tagalog text, again as one would expect, is “Katagalugan”.
Not a single word or phrase in the Tagalog text, in fact, looks to be
incongruous, jarring or anachronistic, and May does not point to any that
do. He thinks that “the person who made
the crucial linguistic choices” in the text was “a historian writing in the
1930s, not the revolutionary of the 1890s”, but he does not substantiate his
suspicions by identifying exactly what he thinks looks out of place.[26] The vocabulary, images and metaphors in the
text, in truth, are so strikingly in keeping with other Katipunan documents
that their concoction in the 1930s from a couple of Spanish translations
would have been nothing less than a work of genius.
Authenticity,
authorship and orthography: the evidence from “Pagibig sa Tinubuang Bayan”
No
printed copy of Kalayaan has yet been located, and perhaps none has
survived. The original document from
which Jose P. Santos transcribed the Tagalog text of “Ang Dapat Mabatid” has
never been placed in the public domain, and might also have been lost. The copper-bottomed, conclusive evidence
that would definitively establish the authenticity of the text may never be
found. Reinforcing all the arguments
detailed above, however, a further powerful indication of its authenticity is
provided by a surviving manuscript copy of the other famous contribution to Kalayaan
attributed to Bonifacio, the poem “Pagibig sa Tinubuang Bayan”.
These
two texts, we noted earlier, have to a degree shared a common history. Epifanio de los Santos translated both into Spanish; Jose
P. Santos published both texts in Tagalog for the first time in Si Andres
Bonifacio at ang Himagsikan. And,
more latterly, Glenn May questions the “content and reliability” of “Pagibig
sa Tinubuang Bayan” in the pages of Inventing a Hero in the same way,
and for the same reasons, as he questions the authenticity of “Ang Dapat
Mabatid”.[27]
The
surviving manuscript copy of “Pagibig sa Tinubuang Bayan” – preserved in the
military archives in Madrid
– establishes beyond question that neither Jose P. Santos nor anybody else
concocted the poem’s known Tagalog text in the twentieth century. The manuscript text is not identical that
published by Santos,
but the significant discrepancies are confined to just a handful of the
poem’s 28 stanzas. In the rest, the
degree of identity between the two texts is massively greater than a
fabricator working from Spanish versions could ever achieve.[28] Jose P. Santos, as he said he did, copied
“Pagibig sa Tinubuang Bayan” from a text written in 1896, and there is
absolutely no reason to doubt that he copied its companion piece, “Ang Dapat
Mabatid”, from an original as well.
Is
it similarly certain that “Pagibig” and “Ang Dapat Mabatid” were both written
by Bonifacio? Unfortunately, it is
not. It would be good to conclude this
note by saying that the “Pagibig” manuscript in the Madrid archives settles this issue, but
the reality is not so neat and tidy.
The initials “A.B.” are inscribed beneath the poem, but the text is in
the handwriting of Emilio Jacinto.[29]
Conversely, a manuscript copy of the Kalayaan editorial
“Sa mga Kababayan”, usually attributed to Emilio Jacinto, is in Bonifacio’s
hand. But the penmanship, of course, does not
necessarily confirm the identities of the respective authors. It is possible that Jacinto copied
“Pagibig” and Bonifacio copied “Sa mga Kababayan” whilst Kalayaan was
being prepared for publication, perhaps for editing purposes and perhaps to
make them more legible for the printers.
About the penmanship of “Ang Dapat Mabatid”, in any event, Jose P.
Santos said nothing. All that can be
said for sure is that Bonifacio and Jacinto collaborated very closely in
putting the paper together, and that in proclaiming the Katipunan’s
revolutionary message they spoke as if with a single voice.
But is there perhaps a small sliver of a clue in the
orthography of the published texts of “Ang Dapat Mabatid” and “Pagibig”? In each of the published texts there are
words in which the letter “g” is followed by the double vowel “ui” – kaguinhawahan,
for example, mahiguit, guinawa
and pamamaguitan. These
spellings are not “wrong”, or even that rare, but more commonly (at least from
the late 19th century onwards) writers have omitted the “u” and employed the
forms kaginhawahan, mahigit
and so on. Emilio Jacinto almost
invariably omitted the “u”, and the manuscript of “Pagibig” in his
handwriting renders none of these words with the “ui” combination. In the largely identical text published by Santos, however, the
same words do have the double vowel.
The “ui” forms are also found in the published text of “Ang Dapat
Mabatid”. Santos, as we noted, said he transcribed
these texts from the originals “without making any changes, even
in the manner and style of the writing.” He did not employ the “ui” forms in his own
writing, and nor do they appear in his transcriptions of Jacinto’s
works. Bonifacio, on the other hand,
switched back and forth, sometimes using the “ui” forms and sometimes
not. By this particular measure, at
least, the documents from which Santos
transcribed the extant texts of “Ang Dapat Mabatid” and “Pagibig” thus seem
more likely to have been penned by Bonifacio than by Jacinto. Tagalog scholars might be able to discern
other variations in orthography (and perhaps in style) that would corroborate
or confute this line of speculation.
Conclusion
Glenn May asks legitimate questions in Inventing a Hero, but does not come up
with the right answers. He is mistaken
about “Ang Dapat Mabatid”, about “Pagibig sa Tinubuang Bayan”, and about at
least three of the four letters Bonifacio wrote to Jacinto from Cavite in 1897.
May’s misjudgment of “Ang Dapat Mabatid”, we have seen,
stems in large degree from his misjudgment of the historian who published the
Tagalog text, Jose P. Santos. May does
not argue that any words or phrases in the text look misplaced or strange, or
that the orthography is anachronistic.
His only worry about the actual text is that he thinks it departs at
certain points from a Spanish translation made from the text in Kalayaan. His telling presumption that this perceived
mismatch calls the Tagalog text into doubt (rather than the Spanish
translation) is symptomatic of his entire case. Time and again, he disputes the
authenticity of a document not on its own merits, but on the basis of his
belief that Jose P. Santos was a dissembler and a fraud.
Santos was unlikely “to have seen anything wrong” in
fabricating “Ang Dapat Mabatid” and other Katipunan texts, May alleges,
because he had a “track record” of dubious practices, and because he “did
such bizarre things with the Bonifacio letters”.[30] But in reality Santos did not have a dodgy track record,
and he did not do anything bizarre.
Each of May’s charges is unjust.
Santos,
says May, “failed to reveal the sources he relied on”. In fact, Santos told his readers quite plainly that
he had copied “Ang Dapat Mabatid” and “Pagibig sa Tinubuang Bayan” from the
“originals”, although it is true he omitted to describe the nature of the
originals. Santos, says May, “failed to indicate where
important documents were located”.
Again, Santos’s
readers were left in no doubt where the documents were located; they were in
his own private collection.
In
relation to the Bonifacio letters, says May, Santos “covered up the possible wrongdoing
of his father, and produced faulty transcriptions of documents he probably
thought to be forgeries.” This charge
is false on two counts – there was no wrongdoing and hence no cover-up
either. Santos’s father translated some genuine
Bonifacio letters into Spanish. Santos had not the
slightest doubt the letters were genuine.
Three decades later Santos
retranslated the letters into Tagalog from the Spanish because he did not
have the originals to hand. He never
claimed, so far as is known, that the retranslations were the original
texts. He was writing in Tagalog for a
Tagalog readership, and he wanted that readership to know what Bonifacio
wrote to Jacinto. He could not
reproduce the actual texts of the letters, but he could at least convey their
thrust, and he did so.
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