On Rizal’s 161st birthday

“Time will tell,” wrote Rizal, “if I am dreaming or I see too far.”

I copied that into my notebook years ago. Without the citation, I can’t go back to the original source and find out its context. Studying Rizal has many challenges, least of all is the fact that he is often read today in very bad translations from the original Spanish, French, German, or Tagalog. If there was one thing I wish for Rizal on his 161st birthday on Sunday, it is to have the critical apparatus to facilitate research on him.

As someone who dips into the 25 volumes of Rizal’s collected writings for a living, I would kill for a simple index. For example, Rizal’s correspondence of over a thousand letters, first compiled, chronologically, by Teodoro M. Kalaw and published before the war as the six-volume “Epistolario Rizalino” (1930-1938) with a supplement in 1953, had no index. While the late Isagani Medina took the trouble to make an Epistolario index, it remains forgotten in typescript at the UP Main Library Filipiniana section. When Rizal’s correspondence was republished and supplemented by the 1961 Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission, you would think someone would have thought of an index. They not only forgot the index, but they also made research more complicated by dividing the letters thematically into Rizal’s correspondence with family members (two volumes); with colleagues in the Propaganda Movement (two volumes); and with Ferdinand Blumentritt (two volumes). All letters that could not be classified into the earlier volumes were consigned to miscellaneous correspondence (one volume).

Aside from an index, also on my wish list are high-resolution scans of all extant Rizal writing and doodles. Before one translates from the original languages into English or Filipino, we must be sure that the transcriptions are accurate. In 2019, I spent an afternoon going over Rizal’s 1884 Madrid diary in the Rare Book Reading Room of the Newberry Library in Chicago and was surprised that the printed edition relied on by scholars for decades had many missing entries, an oversight of the copyist who did this hurriedly by hand, unlike a modern scholar who will scan and run it through Optical Character Recognition to generate a rough printed version with the click of a mouse. Sometimes, a translator misreads Rizal’s handwriting, resulting in a double mistake. In one letter, a translator read the scribbled “Cpn.” (Capitan) for “Col.” translating this as the military rank “Colonel.” Rizal was not referring to a military person but a civil official like a town mayor or “cabeza de barangay” who was addressed as “Kapitan.” To confuse things further, the Kapitan’s wife is addressed as “Kapitana.”

The late Rizalist scholar Esteban de Ocampo (no relation) started me off on my journey into historiography with a funny anecdote. He pointed out an editorial addition made by T.M. Kalaw to one of Rizal’s letters to his sisters written from Germany. In the original, Rizal was showing off by writing “Donnerstag” at the top of the letter. Kalaw presumed this was a place name and added “Donnerstag, [Alemania].” De Ocampo explained with a loud laugh how he tried in vain to locate Donnerstag on a map, only to find out much later that Donnerstag was not a place but “Thursday,” the day of the week Rizal penned the letter. De Ocampo’s story taught me to always validate what comes down to us as received knowledge. This was reinforced by Teodoro A. Agoncillo who advised me to “doubt everything until proven otherwise.” And with a snicker, he added: “Doubt everything, including your parentage!”

As I write this, my book “Rizal Without the Overcoat,” or RWTO for short, is currently being prepared for yet another edition. This year marks the 32nd anniversary since it first saw print. That RWTO is older than my undergrad and grad students is one thing. That it has remained in print and relevant for the last 32 years is another thing. Each year on Rizal’s birthday (June 19) and death anniversary (Dec. 30), I ask myself if it is time to sit down and churn out a new biography of our Lolo Jose. Each time, I back out simply because the only thing I am certain of, after decades of research on Rizal, are my doubts. What does Rizal need on his birthday? An index to his writings.

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