Vicente L. Rafael, Dept. of History, University of Washington
Extract from: Castilian, or the Colonial Uncanny: Translation and Vernacular Theater in the Spanish Philippines.
Vernacular plays came to be known by a variety of names: corridos, linambay (in Cebu), moro-moro (at least by the later nineteenth century). However, they were most widely known as comedya from the Spanish comedia, metrical romances with its roots in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, comedyas had become staple features of lowland Christianized communities. They were performed on makeshift stages in conjunction with the celebration of the town's fiesta which commemorated the feast day of the local patron saint. Actors were taken from among the town's populace, though by the nineteenth century, professionals emerged especially around Manila who were contracted by near by towns to perform. Professionals, however, at no point displaced local performers and writers. Comedyas continued to enjoin popular participation and support, especially in the provinces, until their gradual eclipse by other entertainment forms such as the zarzuela (a kind of operetta) and the cinema (both foreign and local) in the early twentieth century. (1)
Comedias were one of the earliest forms of mass entertainment in the Philippines. Literary historians point out that the earliest comedyas date back to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Written by Spanish clergy in Castilian and in the vernacular, these had explicitly religious themes dealing with the lives of saints meant to promote piety among viewers. Reference is also made to at least one comedia from 1637 based on an actual historical occurrence: the victory of Governor General Sebastian Corcuera over Sultan Kudarat's forces in Mindanao. Such themes, however were relatively marginal. The most popular kind of comedia that emerged by the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century involved the fictionalized and formulaic recounting of the "lives and loves of royal characters" from Moorish and Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe and Persia in the various vernacular languages. It is this most common and wide-spread comedia, often referred to in Tagalog as moro-moro, which will be the focus of what follows. Such plays were sanctioned by the Catholic church and performances had to meet the approval of the parish priest. However, the writers and actors did not, as we shall see, merely reproduce the logic and interests of the colonial-Christian order. For the very popularity of comedias suggested, as I shall argue, other interests at work which, while appearing to re-affirm the social and ideological boundaries set by colonial authorities, also tended to re-draw these.
Comedia performances drew large crowds from within as well as outside the town. Such plays were amalgamations of the various motifs, characters and geographical settings derived from European, mostly Spanish, metrical romances. Their titles suggest as much: "La Guerra Civil de Granada," "Reina Encantada o Casamiento por Fuerza," "Los dos Vireyes," "Principe Baldovino," "Don Gonzalo de Cordoba" and so forth. Plots revolved around the forbidden love between a Christian prince or princess and his or her Moorish counterpart. Disrupting the filial relationship between royal parents and their children, such love invariably led to a series of abductions and searches, highly choreographed battle scenes, magical encounters with monsters, extended discourses on love lost and regained, vows of vengeance, and boasts of physical prowess.
Stretching more than three or four hours through each of the several nights of the town fiesta, performances abruptly ended with the hurried, almost casual conversion of the Moors to Christianity and the reconciliation of the warring families.
Comedyas were translations of such stories into Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilokano and other local languages. However, no Spanish text was ever translated as a whole. Rather, comedyas were composites of various metrical romances and their prior translations. They are translations of translations for which literally no original existed. Yet, as with missionary translations of God's Word into the native languages, comedya writers and performers also retained a notion of untranslatability. They kept certain words and appearances in their original Castilian form. These included proper names of persons and places, titles, stage directions, and other words for which there were no local equivalents. And as with language, so with dress. Costumes were made not so much as faithful copies of their original forms but in ways that suggested their alien origins. As with untranslated bits of Castilian embedded in the vernacular, costumes draped on native bodies sought to evoke foreign places. In the absence of an indigenous pre-colonial classical tradition of royalty and court literature in the Philippines, "kings", "queens", "princess", "dukes" and so forth could only be depicted in ways that suggested vaguely European, vaguely medieval fashions.
Similarly, musical accompaniments when these occurred (especially by the later nineteenth century), were also foreign in origin. Battle scenes for instance featured the "Himno de Riego", derived from a Spanish military march from the later nineteenth century. Untranslated words, "European" costumes and Spanish military music in effect announced the recurring appearance of the foreign in the familiar. Indeed, it was precisely the repeated return of what came from the outside and which now lodged itself inside the local language that constituted the literary specificity of the comedya. As we shall see, it was what gave the plays their vernacular quality and lent to them their wide appeal. Audiences with little or no knowledge of Castilian and Europe found themselves periodically exposed to a spectacular surplus of foreign signifiers. We could think of performances as scenes of translation occurring around the appearance of untranslatable elements. In this sense, they remind us of the missionary translation of Christianity into the local languages. Missionary translation localized Christian discourse while at the same time retaining certain Castilian and Latin words deemed sacred in their original forms.
Certain foreign terms thus came to have a privileged status within the local languages. Such terms transferred but did no translate from one language to another. Translation predicated on untranslatability instituted a linguistic hierarchy that made it seem as if local languages were naturally subordinate to Castilian and Latin. Thus did a second language come to rule over the first.
Foreign words left untranslated came to inhabit and punctuate the flow of native speech within a Christian-colonial order.
Comedyas in some ways recapitulate the missionary logic of translation premised on untranslatability: of the vernacular coming to be by bearing the traces of a foreign arrival. The foreign whether by way of costuming or language, lie at the basis of colonial literary expression in the vernacular. As with Christian discourse, the prospect of coming into contact with the foreign and witnessing its arrival in the vernacular drew people toward performances of plays and rituals alike. A colonial public was shaped in large part by this anticipatory relationship to alien appearances in local contexts, whether these happen in Churches or on the streets during theatrical shows. Yet as much as comedyas may have reiterated missionary logic, they also differed significantly from their ends and by extension from their politics. Such a difference, I want to suggest, comes to foreshadow nationalist understandings of language and power.
1. Histories of the comedya are taken from Wenceslao E. Retana Noticias historico-bibliograficos del teatro en Filipinas desde su origenes hasta 1898, Madrid: V. Suarez, 1909; Vicente Barrantes, El teatro tagalo, Madrid: Tipografia de Manuel G. Hernandez, 1889 among Spanish writers; Epifanio de los Santos, "Florante: Version Castellana del Poema Tagalo con un Ensayo Critico," in The Philippine Review, v.1, no.7, August 1916. In the 1960s and 70s, nationalist scholars rediscovered the comedya at the moment of its near disappearance. See Bienvenido Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 1570-1898: Tradition and Influences in its Development, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1986; Nicanor G. Tiongson, Kasaysayn ng Komedya sa Pilipinas, 1766-1862, Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1982; Resil Mojares, Origins of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel Until 1940, Quezon City: University of the Philippine Press, 1983; and Theater in Society, Society in Theater: A Social History of a Cebuano Village, 1840-1940, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1985; and Doreen Fernandez, Palabas: Essays on Philippine Theater, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996.
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