|
National Artist for Literature Francisco Arcellana succumbed to pneumonia and kidney failure shortly before noon yesterday. He was 85. Arcellana died at 11:45 a.m. at the National Kidney Institute, where he had been confined for a week. His remains will lie in state at the UP Chapel (Parish of the Holy Sacrifice) in Diliman, Quezon City. Arcellana was an author, poet, teacher, essayist, critic and journalist. He was declared a National Artist in 1990. He is considered one of the most important progenitors of the modern Filipino short story in English. He pioneered the development of the short story as a lyrical prose-poetic form. He was born on Sept. 6, 1916 in Sta. Cruz, Manila. He went to elementary and high schools in Tondo, Manila, and completed a PhB. degree at the University of the Philippines in 1939. He was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Creative Writing, 1956-1957, at the University of Iowa, which offered the most prestigious creative writing program in the United States. He was one of the pioneers of the influential writers’ group The Veronicans, 13 pre-war writers whose aim was, according to Fr. Herbert Schneider, SJ of Ateneo, “to make their writing bear the imprint of the Face of the Philippines.” Arcellana joined the faculty of the UP Department of English and Comparative Literature in 1953. He began as an instructor, rising through the hierarchy until he became a top-ranking professor in 1982, after which his tenure was extended. He was appointed Professor Emeritus in July of 1983. Journalism was another of his pursuits. He worked his way up from transcriber to Manila bureau manager at the International News Service, was an editor of the Sunday supplement of The Manila Chronicle, became the adviser of The Philippine Collegian in the ’50s, in the late ’60s and then from 1974 to 1977. Arcellana was one of the bulwarks of the UP writing program from the ’70s on into the ’90s. One of his most distinguished achievements was his appointment as the first and founding director of the UP Creative Writing Center in June 1979, a position he held for three and a half years. Fellows at the UP’s annual writing workshops remember him as a stringent critic with a sharp eye for craftsmanship and a steady supply of witty gibes. Arcellana pioneered and helped keep alive the experimental tradition in Philippine fiction. He viewed fiction as something “that is able to render truth, that is able to present reality.” Particularly conscious of language issues among Filipinos, he expressed the fusion of Tagalog, English and the other regional languages in a writer’s consciousness in terms of a “two- or even three-tongued beast.” UP Professor Amelia Lapena Bonifacio noted in her introduction to The Francisco Arcellana Sampler (1980): “It (was) his signature — one sensitive Filipino writer, by force of historical circumstance, grappling with a borrowed language and succeeding into whipping it to his own desired malleability.” His work has been collected in Selected Stories (1992), Poetry and Politics: The State of Original Writing in English in the Philippines Today (1977), and The Francisco Arcellana Sampler (1980), which brought together some of his most representative stories, poetry and essays. Arcellana left a wife, UP political science Prof. Emerenciana Yuvienco-Arcellana, and six children: Francisco Jr., Elizabeth, Jose, Mayi, Juaniyo and Emerenciana II, 17 grandchildren and six great grandchildren. The UP Creative Writing Center will host a tribute to him on Aug. 16 at the UP main library.
|
|
