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Noli me tángere.

Directed by Gerardo de Leon

Based on the revolutionary novel by Jose Rizal.

Eddie Del Mar Edita Vital Johnny Monteiro Oscar Kesse Teody Belarmino Leopoldo Salcedo Ramon D'Salva Ruben Rustia Max Alvarado Lina Cariño Nello Nayo Engracio Ibarra Lillian Laing Veronica Palileo Joseph de Cordova Manny Ojeda Fred Gonzales Lito Anzures Andres Centenera Jose Garcia Pianing Vidal Dely Villanueva Luis San Juan Francisco Cruz Salvador Zaragoza Jerry Pons Benny Mack Eddie Ilagan Mario Sibal Show All… Anna Marie Nelda Miranda Mila Quirante Eva Cariño Menchu Montenegro Ric Bustamante Tommy Nepomuceno Andres Benitez Carpi Asturias Paquito Salcedo Primo Yumol Rey Panlilio Florence Gumabon Dik Trofeo Doming Del Valle Jose Mari Centenera Rufino Ocampo Felisa Salcedo German Panlilio Renato D'Salva Itoy Victoria Guillermo Carls Robert Arevalo

Director Director

Gerardo de Leon

Writers Writers

Gerardo de Leon Jose Flores Sibal

Original Writer Original Writer

Bayanihan Film Productions Arriba Productions

Philippines

Primary language, spoken languages.

Spanish Tagalog

Alternative Title

Touch Me Not

Action Drama

Releases by Date

01 aug 1961, releases by country.

180 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Michael Haneke Paneke ★★

A faithful adaptation of the *plot* of Rizal's great novel, but it badly misses the mark on the *tone*. Despite the dark storylines, Rizal's prose is satiric and frequently very funny; the humor is almost entirely absent from the film, which makes the Romantic plot elements (so many coincidences!) just seem far-fetched.

It's.....it reminds me of the movies I'd watch in English class in high school, movies that have no real purpose beyond giving you the Cliff's Notes version of the book you only pretended to read. Really did not enjoy this one.

Review by vernon ★★★★

There's much to be said about the sensibilities that director Gerardo de Leon reserved for each of the most memorable points in the novel. The claustrophobic low-angle shots against a looming dark background in the introduction of brothers Crispin and Basilio in the belfry portends a misfortune--that is, the sacristan who barges in menacingly bringing terror in the two child actors' eyes. I think de Leon's camera skills were his greatest strength. His multi-angled fast cuts in the part where Elias wrestles with the crocodile is effectively intense. His shot of Sisa and the leper foregrounding a group of Guardia Civil and the immense Church seen through the eyes of Ibarra is an excellent portrait of the times Jose Rizal…

Review by Emil ★★★

Really torn about this. It's clear Gerardo de Leon has given this more than a fair shot (he's not arguably our greatest classic film director for nothing), but this adaptation only reinforces what I already believe: that Noli is un-filmable. It's just such a sophisticated piece of work seething with anger, and it takes a great teacher to really unpack its satire. (Shout-out to Mr. Apo, who single-handedly made it fun and exciting to get through this novel in high school.) And I'm not saying that cinema isn't capable of doing that, or that de Leon wasn't still moderately successful in capturing the tragedy of the book's latter sections. But Noli has always seemed to me like a work that…

Review by ejay ★★★★

A very detailed adaptation of Rizal’s work of the same name. Noli me Tángere (1961) was so informative and interesting right at every plot point and the smallest of details.

Review by thea ★★★

di ko akalain na darating ang araw na magseselos ako sa buwaya :') sana all na lang nakikipagbuno kay leopoldo salcedo

Review by Marlu Calderon ★★★★

Wow that was a long film for a long ass book.

Sucks that some parts of the prints are beyond repair. FDCP should really work on archiving and restoring more works by National Artists. And showing it to the public!

Review by Louie ★★★★

QCinema International Film Festival 2019 Film #23

I’m just happy I got to experience this on the big screen.

Review by Jay ★★★½

Leopoldo Salcedo is ALWAYS a scene stealer.

Review by jayclops ★★★★

Endured 3 hours of air-conditioned cold in my short shorts Jose Rizal wld be proud of me.

Review by robin ★★★★

Jose Rizal's message is largely dependent on characters and their relationships and Gerardo de Leon did a fine job translating them to screen. The production was evidently well-made. The unfortunate state of its existing print cannot hide the beauty of its cinematography and compositions. This is a definitive adaptation of a timeless novel, a faithful work that captured the spirit of its source material.

I always see calls for series or films based on Noli me Tángere and El Filibusterismo , and I wonder if these people are aware of this film and its sequel's existence. I wonder if the government and the Film Development Council of the Philippines have any plans to introduce further these films especially to students, and to make them widely available.

Review by Rox 🇵🇭 ★★★★

Philippine Cinema's best black and white film. Reminds me so much of The Night of the Hunter (1955) .

Review by pradsjoaquin ★★★★

Most days we assume that the problems of the old times are never our problems again, that they have been solved long ago when the truth is, Noli shows to our faces that the problems faced before are problems we face until now. Noli wasn’t a warning to not repeat it’s footsteps in culture, it’s a mirror to the Philippine people to see that without action there will be no reaction in the end if we continue to feel the need to bind ourselves for our comfort we refuse to have the self-respect and dignity we should know we deserve.

I had acted in the theater version of Noli Me Tangere, I played Elias the farmer, and though he had…

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Review: Jacques Rivette’s 1971 Film, ‘Out 1: Noli Me Tangere’

• Share full article

By Glenn Kenny

• Nov. 3, 2015

Within what is an intense but relatively narrow circle of cinephiles, Jacques Rivette’s 1971 film, “ Out 1: Noli Me Tangere ” (the subtitle is Latin for “touch me not”), is considered, as more than one writer has put it, a kind of filmic holy grail. The nearly 13-hour work, a cinematic soak both sprawling and intimate, has been almost impossible to view in the more than 40 years since its production. The movie was screened in New York in 2006 by the Museum of the Moving Image, but the two-week engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, beginning on Wednesday, is its New York theatrical premiere.

The film, set in Paris, is divided into eight episodes, which BAMcinématek is screening in blocks of two apiece, until Nov. 19. Several home video companies worldwide, including Kino Lorber, are releasing the newly restored picture on DVD and Blu-ray early next year. The episodic structure notwithstanding, the movie does not feel like a television drama; the 773-minute “Out 1: Noli Me Tangere” is an authentic exercise in duration. Less than entirely receptive viewers may see the film only as a challenge to endurance. (Mr. Rivette also distilled his materials into a four-hour version, called “Out 1: Spectre.”)

The nearly two-hour opening episode, “De Lili à Thomas,” for the most part, alternates between the breathing, shouting and stretching exercises of a couple of experimental-theater troupes (this movie was shot and takes place in the Paris of 1970, let’s not forget), and scenes of Jean-Pierre Léaud playing a deaf-mute busker with a harmonica, aggressively panhandling his way through a few bistros. The bistros’ patrons may or may not be aware that they’re extras in a Jacques Rivette film. The frequent Rivette star Juliet Berto also swaggers about in the role of a semi-street person working an even more pugnacious grift, albeit one whose front she has difficulty maintaining.

In his work as a filmmaker and a critic, Mr. Rivette has shown remarkable erudition and, to some, marked eccentricity. He famously detected moral bankruptcy in a particular camera movement in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film, “Kapò,” and his praise of the much-maligned 1995 Hollywood film “ Showgirls ” spearheaded a critical reappraisal of it, at least within the aforementioned circle of cinephiles.

The plot that eventually begins to coalesce within “Out 1,” and around its dozens of characters, is consistent with the thematic concerns and enthusiasms Mr. Rivette has explored throughout his directorial career. He frequently has his film actors portray theater people bringing contemporary theory and practice to classical work. Here, as in his 1960 debut feature, “Paris Nous Appartient,” struggles in stagecraft (two theatrical companies are led by former lovers, played by Michael Lonsdale and Michele Moretti) intersect with intimations of conspiracy.

The half-day’s worth of film Mr. Rivette assembled after a six-week shoot was shot in 16 millimeter, which lends the film’s imagery a near-documentary “realism.” What plays out is a cinematic experience of life as performance, performance as life, reality as a construction and reality as someone else’s construction impinging on your own. The pace, which picks up and slows down throughout, is not some kind of perverse challenge to the audience. It is intrinsic to the inescapable atmosphere of the work. The viewer is best off to “just go with it,” as experienced heads used to say to novice LSD users.

But what is it about? Well, in time, Mr. Léaud’s character, Colin, receives messages that lead him to investigate Balzac’s magnum opus “The Human Comedy” and Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.” Looking into these works, Colin becomes convinced that there is a contemporary iteration of the mysterious power-brokering group that Balzac created and called “the Thirteen.” Ms. Berto’s character discovers something similar, and thinks that there’s profitable blackmail fodder to be derived.

The action of the film then picks up and gains intrigue that anticipates, in some ways, the later work of the director David Lynch. A bit role by Mr. Rivette’s fellow director, Éric Rohmer, sporting a meticulous Van Dyke beard to better portray a skeptical Balzac scholar, is a comic highlight. (“Your poor grasp of reality is matched only by your poor spelling,” Mr. Rohmer’s character tells Colin, who has been submitting questions to him in written form.) The potentially momentum-pushing event of one theater company member’s winning a million francs in a lottery dissipates when another performer makes off with the cash in the same scene. And so on.

The templates of conspiracy and avant la lettre role-playing games Mr. Rivette often uses to power his film scenarios are not necessarily intended to “pay off” in any conventional narrative sense. Sometimes they do (as in the sublime 1974 “Céline and Julie Go Boating” ), and sometimes they don’t (as in 1981’s “Le Pont du Nord” ).

The conclusion of “Out 1” falls somewhere in between. In testing the porousness of the border between narrative and experimental film, and peppering the work with galvanic, surprising, “did that actually happen” events (as when Ms. Berto seems to endure a brutal beating from a leather-clad biker), Mr. Rivette’s movie delivers an experience that is deeply satisfying precisely because it’s kind of exhausting.

“Out 1: Noli Me Tangere,” in French with English subtitles, is not rated. Running time: 12 hours 53 minutes.

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• Cast & crew

Noli me tángere

Epic screen adaptation of the great Jose Rizal's novel, Noli Me Tangere (otherwise known as Touch Me Not or The Social Cancer) and was taken from a Bible verse. Epic screen adaptation of the great Jose Rizal's novel, Noli Me Tangere (otherwise known as Touch Me Not or The Social Cancer) and was taken from a Bible verse. Epic screen adaptation of the great Jose Rizal's novel, Noli Me Tangere (otherwise known as Touch Me Not or The Social Cancer) and was taken from a Bible verse.

• Gerardo de Leon
• Jose Flores Sibal
• Eddie Del Mar
• Edita Vital
• Johnny Monteiro
• 1 Critic review
• 6 wins & 3 nominations

Top cast 53

• Crisostomo Ibarra
• (as Eduardo del Mar)
• Maria Clara
• Padre Salvi
• Padre Damaso
• Doña Victorina
• (as Lillian Laing de Leon)

• Tenyente Guevarra
• Pilosopong Tasyo

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Director Gerardo de Leon made this film to fulfill his "aesthetics promise" during the production of Sisa (1951) .
• Connections Followed by El filibusterismo (1962)

User reviews

• June 16, 1961 (Philippines)
• Philippines
• Jose Rizal's Noli me tángere
• Bacolor, Pampanga, Philippines
• Bayanihan Film Productions
• Arriba Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Runtime 3 hours
• Black and White

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Out 1, Noli Me Tangere

What to know.

Time is an essential character in Jacques Rivette's Out 1, Noli Me Tangere , a brilliant 13-hour study of human relationships and an exploration of how a generation's dreams and ideals slowly fade as life goes ruthlessly by.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Jacques Rivette

Juliet Berto

Pierre Baillot

Michel Berto

Jean Bouise

MISSION: To foster FILIPINO NATIONALISM. "Shake the foundations." Seek knowledge/understand/think critically about roots of socioeconomic-political predicaments in our homeland; educate ourselves, expose lies/hidden truths and fight IGNORANCE of our true history. Learn from: our nationalist heroes/intellectuals/Asian neighbors/other nations;therefrom to plan/decide/act for the "common good" of the native [Malay/indio] Filipino majority. THIS BLOG IS NOT FOR PROFIT.

Friday, December 17, 2021

Noli me tangere': a review...the first filipino - benedict anderson (london review of books), "the history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present." ernest dimnet, 1866-1954, french clergyman, "for we wish to understand the spirit of an age to see into its heart and mind, and to acquire a feel for how those who lived in it responded to their world and coped with its dilemmas." - a. c. grayling, notes to readers:   1. colored and/or underlined words are html links. click on them to see the linked posts/articles. forwarding this and other posts to relatives and friends, especially those in the homeland, is greatly appreciated. to share, use all social media tools: email, blog, google+, tumblr, twitter, facebook, etc. thanks 2. click the following underlined title/link to checkout these essential/primary readings about us filipino natives: primary blog posts/readings for my fellow, native (malay/indio) filipinos-in-the-philippines 3. instantly translate to any of 71 foreign languages. go to the sidebar on the right to choose your preferred language. 4. the postings are oftentimes long and a few readers have claimed being "burnt out."  my apologies. t he selected topics are not for entertainment but to stimulate deep, serious thoughts per my mission statement and hopefully to rock our boat of ignorance, apathy, complacency, and hopefully lead to active citizenship.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   *************************.

To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful." - Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965)

Hi All, I just picked up a newer edition (2006) of "Imagined Communities - Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism"  by Benedict Anderson.  In its new Preface, Anderson made a comment that the English translation of the NOLI ME TANGERE by Leon Ma. Guerrero was a "fascinatingly corrupt" version. Since I own and read the two Rizal novels (with EL FILIBUSTERISMO) translated by Guerrero, I was intrigued to find out what Anderson meant. And fortunately, I found what Anderson was talking about. Without much ado, here it is. -- Bert M. Drona, December 17, 2021 NOTE TO MYSELF AND FELLOW NATIVE FILIPINOS: Anderson's commentary seemingly implies the need for us native Filipinos to learn the Spanish language to know our past; given that 350 years of Spanish colonization have been placed in oblivion due to our ignorance of this colonial language; thanks to the Spaniards who never wanted us to be educated and the successor American colonial masters who schooled us but at the expense of destroying our Spanish colonial history, plus killing our native tongues, i.e. thus nationalism, via a subtly imposed Americanized colonial mentality. In essence, we native Filipinos (then "Indios") remain strangers -without a sense of national consciousness as one people- in our own land. Remember that the late nationalist Senator Claro M. Recto sponsored and had the requirement to study the Spanish Language implemented. I remember that we were not told why and it is only when one thinks of history that knowledge and proficiency in it becomes a very useful endeavor. It is always best to read the original vis-a-vis a translation. MY APOLOGY. I STILL HAVE TO CLEAN UP THE BORDER FORMATTING.

First Filipino

Benedict anderson.

Few countries give the observer a deeper feeling of historical vertigo than the Philippines. Seen from Asia, the armed uprising against Spanish rule of 1896, which triumphed temporarily with the establishment of an independent republic in 1898, makes it the visionary forerunner of all the other anti-colonial movements in the region. Seen from Latin America, it is, with Cuba, the last of the Spanish imperial possessions to have thrown off the yoke, seventy-five years after the rest. Profoundly marked, after three and a half centuries of Spanish rule, by Counter-Reformation Catholicism, it was the only colony in the Empire where the Spanish language never became widely understood. But it was also the only colony in Asia to have had a university in the 19 th  century. In the 1890s barely 3 per cent of the population knew ‘Castilian’, but it was Spanish-readers and writers who managed to turn movements of resistance to colonial rule from hopeless peasant uprisings into a revolution. Today, thanks to American imperialism, and the Philippines’ new self-identification as ‘Asian’, almost no one other than a few scholars understands the language in which the revolutionary heroes communicated among themselves and with the outside world – to say nothing of the written archive of pre-20 th -century Philippine history. A virtual lobotomy has taken place.

The central figure in the revolutionary generation was José Rizal, poet, novelist, ophthalmologist, historian, doctor, polemical essayist, moralist, and political dreamer. He was born in 1861 into a well-to-do family of mixed Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Tagalog descent: five years after Freud, four years after Conrad, one year after Chekhov; the same year as Tagore; five years before Sun Yat-sen, three years before Max Weber, eight years before Gandhi, and nine before Lenin. Thirty-five years later he was arrested on false charges of inciting Andrés Bonifacio’s uprising of August 1896, and executed by a firing squad composed of native soldiers led by Spanish officers. The execution was carried out in what is now the beautiful Luneta Park, which fronts the shoreline of Manila Bay. (On the other side of the Spanish world, José Martí, the hero of Cuban nationalism, had died in action the previous year.) At the time of Rizal’s death, Lenin had just been sentenced to exile in Siberia, Sun Yat-sen had begun organising for Chinese nationalism outside China, and Gandhi was conducting his early experiments in anti-colonial resistance in South Africa.

He was growing up at a time when modern politics had begun to arrive in the colony. More than any other imperial power, 19 th -century Spain was wracked by deep internal conflicts, not merely the endless Carlist wars over the succession, but also between secular liberalism and the old aristocratic-clerical order. The brief liberal triumph in the Glorious Revolution of 1868, which drove the licentious Isabella   II   from Madrid, had immediate repercussions for the remote Pacific colony. The revolutionaries promptly announced that the benefits of their victory would be extended to the colonies. The renewed ban on the Jesuits and the closure of monastic institutions seemed to promise the end of the reactionary power of the Orders overseas. In 1869, the first ‘liberal’ Captain-General, Carlos María de la Torre, arrived in Manila, it is said to popular cries of ‘Viva la Libertad!’ (How unimaginable is a scene of this kind in British India or French Algeria.) During his two-year rule, de la Torre enraged the old-guard colonial élite, not merely by instituting moves to give equal legal rights to natives, mestizos and peninsulars, but also by going walkabout in Manila in everyday clothes and without armed guards. The collapse of the Glorious Revolution brought about a ferocious reaction in Manila, however, culminating in 1872 in the public garrotting of three secular (i.e. non-Order) priests (one creole, two mestizo), framed for masterminding a brief mutiny in the arsenal of Cavite.

The Rizal family was an immediate victim of the reaction. In 1871, when José was ten years old, his mother was accused of poisoning a neighbour, forced to walk twenty miles to prison, and held there for over two years before being released. His elder brother Paciano, a favourite pupil of Father Burgos, the leader of the garrotted priests, narrowly escaped arrest and was forced to discontinue his education. Under these circumstances, in 1882, with his brother’s support, José left quietly for the relative freedom of Spain to continue his medical studies.

He spent the next five years in Europe, studying on and off, but also travelling widely – to Bismarck’s Germany and Gladstone’s England, as well as Austro-Hungary, Italy and France – and picking up French, German and English with the ease of an obsessive and gifted polyglot. Europe affected him decisively, in two related ways. Most immediately, he came quickly to understand the backwardness of Spain itself, something which his liberal Spanish friends frequently bemoaned. This put him in a position generally not available to colonial Indians and Vietnamese, or, after the Americans arrived in Manila, to his younger countrymen: that of being able to ridicule the metropolis from the same high ground from which, for generations, the metropolis had ridiculed the natives. More profoundly, he encountered what he later described as ‘el demonio de las comparaciones’, a memorable phrase that could be translated as ‘the spectre of comparisons’. What he meant by this was a new, restless double-consciousness which made it impossible ever after to experience Berlin without at once thinking of Manila, or Manila without thinking of Berlin. Here indeed is the origin of nationalism, which lives by making comparisons.

It was this spectre that, after some frustrating years writing for  La Solidaridad , the organ of the small group of committed ‘natives’ fighting in the metropole for political reform, led him to write  Noli me tangere , the first of the two great novels for which Rizal will always be remembered. He finished it in Berlin just before midnight on 21 February 1887 – eight months after Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill was defeated, and eight years before  Almayer’s Folly  was published. He was 26.

The two most astonishing features of  Noli Me Tangere  are its scale and its style. Its characters come from every stratum of late colonial society, from the liberal-minded peninsular Captain-General down through the racial tiers of colonial society – creoles, mestizos,  chinos  (‘pure’ Chinese) to the illiterate  indio  masses. Its pages are crowded with Dominicans, shady lawyers, abused acolytes, corrupt policemen, Jesuits, smalltown caciques, mestiza schoolgirls, ignorant peninsular carpetbaggers, hired thugs, despairing intellectuals, social-climbing  dévotes , dishonest journalists, actresses, nuns, gravediggers, artisans, gamblers, peasants, market-women and so on. (Rizal never fails to give even his most sinister villains their moments of tenderness and anguish.) Yet the geographical space of the novel is strictly confined to the immediate environs of the colonial capital, Manila. The Spain from which so many of the characters have at one time or another arrived is always off-stage. This restriction made it clear to Rizal’s first readers that ‘The Philippines’ was a society in itself, even though those who lived in it had as yet no common name. That he was the first to imagine this ‘social whole’ explains why he is remembered today as the ‘First Filipino’.

The novel’s style is still more astonishing, for it combines two radically distinct and at first glance uncombinable genres: melodrama and satire. For all its picaresque digressions, the plot is pure melodrama. The novel opens with the wealthy, handsome and naively idealistic mestizo, Don Crisostomo Ibarra, returning from a long educational sojourn in Europe with plans to modernise his home town and his  patria , and to marry his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara, the beautiful mestiza daughter of the wealthy  indio  cacique, Don Santiago de los Santos. At first he is welcomed with respect and enthusiasm, but the clouds soon gather. He discovers that his father has died in prison, framed by the brutal Franciscan friar Padre Damaso, and that his body has been thrown into the sea. Later he will learn that Damaso is the real father of his bride-to-be. Meanwhile, the young parish priest Padre Salvi secretly lusts after Maria Clara, and has covered up the murder of one of his young acolytes. Gradually, Ibarra also learns of the sinister origins of his own line in a cruel, cartpetbagging Basque, who after ruining many local peasants, hanged himself. He makes friends with Don Tasio, the local freethinking  philosophe , with liberal-minded local caciques, even with the Captain-General himself, as well as with the mysterious  indio  rebel Elias. (The dialogues between the two men on whether political reform is possible in the Philippines or a revolutionary upheaval inevitable continue to this day to be part of Philippine progressive discourse and historiography.) Meanwhile, the friars and their various local allies scheme to abort Ibarra’s marriage and his plans for establishing a modern school in his hometown. Finally, Padre Salvi, learning of a planned rebel attack on his town, frames Ibarra as its instigator and financier. The young man is imprisoned in a wave of anti-subversive arrests, torture and executions, but escapes with Elias’s help, and ends as an outlaw. Maria Clara, to avoid being forced into a loveless marriage with an insipid peninsular, chooses to become a nun, and compels her real father, whom she confronts with his adultery, to help her take her vows. She disappears into a convent where, however, Padre Salvi has managed to get himself appointed as spiritual adviser, so nameless ‘horrors’ lie in wait for the unfortunate girl.

So far, so Puccini, one might say. Yet this melodramatic plot is interspersed not only with brilliant sketches of colonial provincial society, but with the novelist’s own unquenchable laughter at the expense of his own inventions – so that  Tosca  changes into Goya’s  Caprichos . Consider the famous opening of the novel:

Towards the end of October, Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly known as Capitan Tiago, was hosting a dinner which, in spite of its having been announced only that afternoon, against his wont, was already the theme of all conversation in Binondo, in the neighbouring districts, and even in Intramuros. Capitan Tiago was reputed to be a most generous man, and it was known that his home, like his country, never closed its door to anything, as long as it was not business, or any new or bold idea.   Like an electric jolt the news circulated around the world of social parasites: the pests or dregs which God in His infinite goodness created and very fondly breeds in Manila. Some went in search of shoe polish for their boots, others for buttons and cravats, but all were preoccupied with the manner in which to greet with familiarity the master of the house, and thus pretend that they were old friends, or to make excuses, if the need arose, for not having been able to come much earlier.   This dinner was being given in a house on Anloague Street, and since we can no longer recall its number, we will try to describe it in such a way as to make it still recognisable – that is, if earthquakes have not ruined it. We do not believe that its owner would have had it pulled down, this task being ordinarily taken care of by God, or Nature, with whom our government also has many projects under contract.

Or consider the opening of the novel’s final chapter (‘Epilogue’), which comes immediately after the story has reached its grim, Gothic conclusion:

Many of our characters being still alive, and having lost sight of the others, a true epilogue is not possible. For the good of the public we would gladly kill all our personages starting with Padre Salvi and finishing with Doña Victorina, but that is not possible   . . .  let them live: the country, and not we, will in the end have to feed them   . . .

This kind of authorial play with readers, characters and reality – which reminds one of Machado de Assis’s sardonic  Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas  (published five years earlier) – is quite uncharacteristic of most serious 19 th -century novels, and gives  Noli Me Tangere  a special appeal. It is what has always doomed nationalist attempts to put the book on stage or screen. It was surely this same laughter that earned Rizal the implacable enemies who brought him to his early death.

It is impossible to read  Noli Me Tangere  today in the way a patriotic young Manileño of 1897 would have read it: as a political hand grenade. We all have the spectre of comparisons crouched on our shoulders. It was only the second novel ever written by a putative Filipino, the first being minor, experimental trash. So what about other great colonial novels by the colonised? There is nothing in the Americas, nothing in the rest of South-East Asia, nothing in Africa till three-quarters of a century later. What about the comparison with metropolitan Spain? It has been said that Rizal borrowed heavily from Galdós, in particular from his 1876 anticlerical novel  Doña Perfecta . But Rizal’s novel is so superior in scale and depth that this ‘borrowing’ is very doubtful. In his voluminous correspondence Rizal never mentions Galdós – whose opinions on colonial questions were wholly bien-pensant. The one Spanish writer for whom he had a passionate admiration was not a novelist at all, but the brilliant satirical journalist José Mariano de la Larra, who had committed suicide in 1837, at the attractive age of 28.

And Tagore, Rizal’s exact contemporary? Here one sees a profound contrast. Tagore was the inheritor of a vast and ancient Bengali literary tradition, and most of his novels were written in Bengali for the huge Bengali population of the Raj. The mother tongue of Rizal was Tagalog, a minority language spoken by perhaps two million people in the multilingual Philippine archipelago, with no tradition of prose writing, and readable by perhaps only a few thousand. He tells us why he wrote in Spanish, a language understood by only 3 per cent of his countrymen, when he invokes ‘tú que me lees, amigo ó enemigo’ – ‘you who read me, friend or enemy’. He wrote as much for the enemy as the friend, something that did not happen with the Raj until the work, a century later, of Salman Rushdie.

Rizal could not know it, but there were to be huge costs involved in choosing to write in Spanish. Five years after his martyrdom, a greedy and barbarous American imperialism destroyed the independent Republic of the Philippines, and reduced the inhabitants once again to the status of colonial subjects. American was introduced as the new language of truth and international status, and promoted through an expanding school system. By the eve of World War Two, it had (narrowly) become the most widely understood language in the archipelago. Spanish gradually disappeared, so that by the time a quasi-independence was bestowed in 1946, it had become unreadable. Not merely the novels, essays, poetry and political articles of Rizal himself, but the writings of the whole nation-imagining generation of the 1880s and ’90s had become inaccessible. Today, most of the work of the brilliant anti-colonial propagandist Marcelo del Pilar, of the Revolution’s architect Apolinario Mabini, and of the Republic’s tragically assassinated general of genius Antonio Luna remain sepulchred in Spanish.

Hence the eerie situation which obliges Filipinos to read the work of the most revered hero of the nation in translation – into local vernaculars, and into American. Hence also a politics of translation. Translations of  Noli Me Tangere  into most of the major languages of the Philippines were bound to fail, not merely because of the absurdity of the many Spanish characters ‘speaking’ in Tagalog, Cebuano or Ilocano, but because the  enemigo  readers automatically disappear, and the satirical descriptions of mestizos and  indios  speaking bad Spanish, and Spanish colonials slipping into bad Tagalog, become untranslatable. The most important American translation, done by the alcoholic anti-American diplomat León María Guerrero in the Sixties – still the prescribed text for high schools and universities – is no less fatally flawed by systematic bowdlerisation in the name of official nationalism. Sex, anticlericalism and any perceived relevance to the contemporary nation are all relentlessly excised, with the aim of turning Rizal into a boring, long-dead national saint.

Which brings us to the present translation, more or less timed for the centenary of Rizal’s execution. A few years ago, Doreen Fernandez, one of the Philippines’ most distinguished scholars, deeply disturbed by the corruption of Rizal’s texts, went in search of a compatriot linguistically capable of making a reliable translation. She eventually found one in Soledad Lacson-Locsin, an elderly upper-class woman born early enough in this century for Rizal’s Spanish – by no means the same as 1880s Madrid Spanish – to be second nature to her. The old lady completed new translations of both  Noli Me Tangere  and its even more savage 1891 sequel  El Filibusterismo  just before she died.

In most respects, it is a huge advance over previous translations, handsomely laid out and with enough footnotes to be helpful without being pettifogging. But the barbarous American influence is still there, to say nothing of the basic transformation of consciousness that created, for the first time, within a year or so of Rizal’s execution, a national idea of ‘the’ Filipino.

In Rizal’s novels the Spanish words  filipina  and  filipino  still mean what they had traditionally meant – i.e. creoles, people of ‘pure’ Spanish descent who were born in the Philippines. This stratum was, in accordance with traditional imperial practice, wedged in between  peninsulares  (native Spaniards) and mestizos,  chinos  and  indios . The novels breathe nationalism of the classical sort, but this nationalism has to do with love of patria, not with race: ‘Filipino’ in the 20 th -century ethno-racial sense never appears. But by 1898, when Apolinario Mabini began to write – two years after Rizal’s execution – the old meaning had vanished. Hence the fundamental difficulty of the present translation is that  filipino/filipina  almost always appear in the anachronistic form of Filipino/Filipina: for example, ‘el bello sexo está representado por españolas peninsulares y filipinas’ (‘the fair sex is represented by peninsular and creole Spanish women’) is rendered absurdly as ‘the fair sex being represented by Spanish peninsular ladies and Filipinas’.

The other problem is a flattening of the political and linguistic complexity of the original, no doubt because Mrs Lacson-Locsin was born just too late to have had an élite Spanish-era schooling. When Rizal had the racist Franciscan friar Padre Damaso say contemptuously, ‘cualquier bata de la escuela lo sabe,’ he mockingly inserted the Tagalog  bata  in place of the Spanish  muchacho  to show how years in the colony had unconsciously creolised the friar’s language. This effect disappears when Mrs Lacson-Locsin translates the words as ‘any schoolchild knows that.’ Rizal quotes three lines of the much-loved 19 th -century Tagalog poet Francisco Balthazar in the original, without translating it into Spanish, to create the necessary intercultural jarring; but quoting the poem in the same language as the text surrounding it erases the effect. The ironical chapter heading ‘Tasio el loco ó el filósofo’ shrinks to ‘Tasio’, and one would not suspect that the chapter heading ‘A Good Day is Foretold by the Morning’ was originally in Italian. The translator also has difficulties with Rizal’s use of untranslated Latin.

There are a few prophets who are honoured in their own country, and José Rizal is among them. But the condition of this honour has for decades been his unavailability. Mrs Lacson-Locsin has changed this by giving the great man back his sad and seditious laughter. And it is badly needed – if one thinks of all those ‘social parasites: the pests or dregs which God in His infinite goodness created and very fondly breeds in Manila’.

                                                                        *********

Vol. 19 No. 24 · 11 December 1997

For weeks now, I have been puzzling over a curious line in Benedict Anderson’s review of José Rizal’s  Noli Me Tangere  ( LRB , 16 October ). Since Rizal wrote in Spanish, Anderson claims, ‘he wrote as much for the enemy as the friend, something that did not happen with the Raj until the work, a century later, of Salman Rushdie.’ I surmise that the colonists are the enemies and those with the same mother tongue are friends, but I am still left with questions. Since (as Anderson notes) far more of his enemies than his friends knew Spanish, wasn’t Rizal writing more for his enemies than his friends? Whatever the merits of post-colonial theory, surely Rushdie’s work appeared after the Raj? Innumerable Indians before Rushdie wrote for their enemies, from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to A. Madaviah, who wrote four novels in English for the express purpose of enlightening the British. I believe Tagore won the Nobel Prize for his English-language writings. Many of these writers also wrote in their own languages – and their bilingualism much better suits the phrase ‘as much for the enemy as the friend’. Nor is Bengali an ‘ancient’ language any more than, say, French, and there’s something odd about the remark that Tagore wrote for the ‘huge Bengali population of the Raj’. Surely Tagore wrote for the huge Bengali population of the world?

V.K.  Mina New York

Vol. 20 No. 3 · 5 February 1998

V.K.  Mina is wrong in stating that Rabindranath Tagore ‘won the Nobel Prize for his English-language writings’ ( Letters, 11 December 1997 ). He was awarded the prize for work written in Bengali.

Miguel Orio Nederland, Colorado

Vol. 19 No. 22 · 13 November 1997

It was gratifying to see Benedict Anderson write a political as well as a literary analysis of the latest translation of José Rizal’s  Noli Me Tangere  ( LRB , 16 October ). Although Rizal is not that well known internationally, he has not really been ‘unavailable’ in the Philippines. When the Americans took the country over they found him an ideal hero to promote since he had not – unlike Bonifacio, Mabini, Aguinaldo and others – advocated revolution or independence. The national literature has long been replete with writings by and on Rizal. Like Martin Luther King (but not, say, Jesse Jackson), he was a safe figure for the establishment to celebrate.

As Anderson notes, Rizal wrote mainly in Spanish, for he wished to address his ‘enemies’ as well as his ‘friends’. In the Philippines, unlike Latin America, Spanish never became a language of the people. One reason is that when the Spaniards settled the Philippines, there were already populations with well developed languages and alphabets, and the Spaniards were never more than a small minority. Nor did they establish a public school system (although they did establish universities, and much earlier than the 19 th  century cited by Anderson – Santo Tomás, founded in 1616, is 25 years older than Harvard), and pedagogically inclined parish priests and native Filipinos taught the  catón  in the local languages. Spanish, too, was overwhelmingly the language of the (print) media and government, so that the educated and those wishing to read had to know it, much as the Arab intelligentsia in Algeria had to know French. But the real tragedy was the low level of literacy in  any  language, which the Americans raised when they established a public school system, albeit in English.

Anderson (like Rizal) perhaps makes too much of ethno-racial parallels with Latin America. True, there were ‘peninsulares’ and ‘filipinos’ – people of ‘pure’ Spanish descent born in the Philippines – but the latter were few compared with their Latin American counterparts. There was never a movement of ‘white filipinos’ to secede from Spain. Also unlike most of Latin America, the Philippines was ruled during much of its colonial history through the viceroy in Mexico rather than directly by Spain. Such esoteric distinctions, in any case, were lost on the vaster native population. This is shown by the fact that, as Anderson has noted, by the time Mabini was writing, a mere two years after Rizal’s execution, the ‘old meaning [of “filipino”] had vanished’.

It is interesting to note that although the term ‘mestizo’ has practically the same meaning in the Philippines and Latin America, it denotes someone with part Indian ‘blood’ in the latter, and someone with part Spanish (or Chinese) blood in the former. The definitions are identical but the perspectives are not. The culture of the Philippines  is  a blend, whereas the Latin American establishment remains Spanish with its native population marginalised.

Ruben Mendez UN  Development Programme

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