Filipiniana.net’s 100 Nobelang Tagalog

A very good thing that’s happening recently on the novel in Filipino online is Filipiniana.net’s project to upload 100 novels in Tagalog. The list includes novels published from 1864 to 1959. It is mostly under construction to date; only about 20 of the novels have accessible links, and most of these links will only lead you to executive summaries at best. Nonetheless, I expect these to get worked out soon.

So I’d like to address more important concerns.

First, it’s good that they used Tagalog instead of Filipino, since all of the novels in the list were written prior to the establishment of Filipino as the national language. (I also deliberated on it for some time before posting this timeline of novels in Filipino for the first time, but decided that Filipino would be more appropriate than Tagalog; all of the works may arguably be considered Filipino, but definitely not all were written in ”Tagalog”.)

Second, I have problems with the inclusion of these titles in the list:

1) Urbana at Feliza by Modesto De Castro and Si Tandang Basio Macunat by Miguel Lucio Bustamante were not considered as novels by most critics on the novel, like Soledad S. Reyes and Resil B. Mojares. Mojares called them proto-novels at best and recognized their original function as manual de urbanidad and tratado, respectively.

2) Ninay (1885) by Pedro Paterno, often recognized as the first Filipino novel, was originally written in Spanish, and was only translated in Tagalog by R. Reyes in 1908.

3) The case of Ninay is of course also true of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. I am not comfortable calling them “Tagalog” novels, even if Filipiniana.net includes only their 1906 and 1912 translations in Tagalog. If the ”translations” were enough to make them Tagalog novels, what would inhibit me from calling Fray Antonio de Borja’s 1708 translation of Barlaan at Josaphat in Tagalog as the first Tagalog novel? Or if I translate Eric Gamalinda’s My Sad Republic to Tagalog, I don’t think it will turn the work into a Tagalog novel. (I also don’t think that changing the title of the list from “Nobelang Tagalog” into “Nobela sa Tagalog” would easily resolve the problem.)

Because of these problems and other questionable details (e.g., Macario Pineda’s Ang Ginto sa Makiling was published in 1947, according to Soledad S. Reyes, and not in 1946, which is what’s posted on Filipiniana.net), I have some reservations with the scholarship behind the list. Naturally, I hesitate to add the titles from their list, which are not yet included in my timeline. I’d have to double-check first with other sources.

~ by ecsamar on February 24, 2008.