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Jose Garcia
Villa Makes It to World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity
to Our Time, Edited by Washburn & Major
By Alberto
Florentino
WHAT MAKES World
Poetry doubly interesting to me—and to the Filipino people—is
that the anthology includes l,600 poems by hundreds of poets published
in hundreds of languages and cultures within a time span of four
millennia (or 40 centuries) from the development of the alphabet/writing/poetry
in ancient Sumer and Egypt circa 2200 BC up to the 20th century
(1915). Since the (three) editors of World Poetry are presumably
all Americans and the book was published in New York, the language
of the book and its poetry selections are all in English—originally
written in English, or in a “foreign” (i.e., non-English)
language but translated into English (80% of the book).
Unlike most
of the year-, century- and millennium-end books and magazines coming
out of the American presses since the last year/last decade of the
second millennium, World Poetry, contrary to expectations,
is dominated by British and American poets or by poems originally
written in English. Well represented in this anthology are the oeuvres
of major writers/poets in previous centuries and millennia, from
the Bronze and Iron Ages (2200-250 BC) through the Renaissance in
Europe (14th-17th centuries) to the 20th century (1915), including
folk/oral and written/printed literary works, in cuneiform and hieroglyphics
to exotic orthographies, in dead, dormant, dying, and living languages,
in the East/West, North/South hemispheres, and covering much of
the major civilizations on the planet, including Europe, Asia (South
and Southeast), etc.
What makes World
Poetry most interesting to this writer was the inclusion of two
Filipino poets: one from the late 19th century and the second from
the 20th century (or three, counting the third poet who is represented
only as a translator of the first poet, Rizal).
The poets are:
* Jose Rizal (1861-1896);
* Jose Garcia Villa (1908-1997);
* Nick Joaquin (only as translator) (1917- )
Jose Rizal is
a (or the?) Philippine national hero, polyglot, poet, zarzuelista,
novelist, and Philippine “National Treasure”; who wrote
in Spanish and was executed by the Spaniards on December 30, 1896,
for having written two (subversive) novels in a foreign tongue (Spanish).
He is represented in World Poetry, not by his famous poem, “Ultimo
Adios,” but by a translation into English (by Nick Joaquin)
of a short poem which is reprinted here:
Filipino-Spanish
Jose Rizal (1861-1896)
Water and
Fire
Water are we,
you say, and yourselves fire;
so let us be what we are
and co-exist without ire,
and may no conflagration ever find us at war:
But rather, fused together by cunning science
within the cauldrons of the ardent breast,
without rage, without defiance,
do we form steam, fifth element indeed:
progress, life, enlightenment, and speed!
(tr. by Nick Joaquin)
At the peak
of his life, Jose Garcia Villa was the greatest living poet (or
writer) who was educated and wrote
in English, joined the global diaspora of writers from the East,
lived most of his life in Manhattan, and was declared a Philippine
National Artist in 1973. He is represented in World Poetry, not
by his major opus, (the “comma-poem”) “The Anchored
Angel,” but by three Villa poems: “Now I Prize Yellow
Strawberries,” “Inviting a Tiger for the Weekend,”
and “I Was Speaking of Oranges to a Lady.”
Nick Joaquin
is today the country’s greatest living writer—a major
writer of prose (novels, stories, essays, biographies) and a minor
writer of poetry, and a Philippine National Artist. He is in World
Poetry only as a translator of Rizal’s short lyric, “Water
and Fire.” Missing in the book is the ever popular expatriate
Carlos Bulosan and Manila’s Bienvenido Santos and NVM Gonzalez,
masters of prose and the novel, who also “dabbled” in
poetry.
Francisco Balagtas
Baltazar, the writer who wrote, in his native tongue (Tagalog),
his masterpiece in verse, (Plorante at Laura, is not included but
is mentioned in a stray sentence.
World Poetry--to
get back to the anthology after much digressions—carries a
wide range of poetry and verse: in length or size, from ghazals,
haiku and quatrains to (excerpts) from epics, drama in verse; from
the Hebrew Bible, Greek Poetry to Homeric epics; the Vedas and Bhagavad-Gita;
from Latin and Roman Poetry, and from India, Japan, and China; Anglo-Saxon
Poetry, and Poetry from the Northern Countries to France, Spain
and other Hispanic Countries, Persia, Maya, including the poets
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Poetry from England, America, and Africa.
Most of the major writers (of both prose and poetry) include: the
authors of the Gilgamesh, Basho, Li Po, and world authors of Icelandic
sagas, the Carmina Burana, and Homer, Dante, Goethe, Verlaine, Yeats,
Rilke, Mallarme.
World Poetry
has antecedents in 200 years of American book publishing. For more
than a century university presses have been organizing and publishing
anthologies of American, English-language, or world literatures
(poetry, prose, drama, novels, short stories, essays, journalism).
Acting as the organizer and repository and publisher of literary
works in English and/or in English translation, the Americans have
gained the market and world audience for English-language publications,
publishing the highest number of titles of books (60,000 in 1999)
in English every year. Since the start of American literature and
US book-publishing, many attempts have been made to compile the
best of the world poetry anthologies. World Poetry is a direct descendant
of An Anthology of World Poetry edited in 1928 by Mark Van Doren.
Work on this 1998 World Poetry was started by Clifton Fadiman, the
indefatibable anthologizer of poetry and prose in English who was
then old and getting blind. He resigned from the book project and
left it to his co-editors, although he was prevailed upon to remain
on the title page as general editor.
For decades
(or almost a century) the Filipinos have been monitoring the inclusion
in world or US anthologies (and textbooks, etc.) of Filipinos in
the Philippines writing in English and the so-called “Filipino
Americans” in the U.S. mainland writing and contributing to
the latter-day multicultural, multi-ethnic nature of American literary
history, canon, and school curriculum. American anthologies of prose
and poetry started as early as the beginnings of American literature.
One of the earliest anthologies, A Treasury of Asian Literature,
ed. by John Yohannan, did not include any Filipino writer or Philippine
literary works. In the early decades (from the mid-40s and the 50s
onward), Filipino writers (poets and prose writers) were frequently
included in anthologies with writers from South Asia, Southeast
Asia, the Americas, etc. But there were periods when less Filipinos
were published, even as writers from other new countries started
getting more space.
As early as
1932-1933, Jose Garcia Villa, then living in the US, caught the
attention of American and British editors and anthologists and was
one of the few Asians hailed and lionized by the literary establishment.
In a historic photograph of a party at the famous bookstore in mid-Manhattan
(Gotham Bookstore) Villa was the only Asian or Filipino in a crowd
of British and American top authors. While in America, Villa published
two poetry collections in Manila, and in the US a collection of
his short stories and three poetry collections.
Other Filipino
authors who were frequently published in mainstream magazines, literary
journals, textbooks and anthologies included Carlos Bulosan, Carlos
P. Romulo, Bienvenido Santos, NVM Gonzalez, Manuel Arguilla, Stevan
Javellana, Wilfrido Nolledo, and in the 80s and 90s, Jessica Hagedorn
and Ninotchka Rosca.
In the early
30s, when Villa first landed in the US and joined the literary establishment,
he was visible from the early 30s to the outbreak of World War II
(1941). In the early 30s (1932-33) he was hailed by Edward J. O’
Brien (in his introduction to Villa’s Footnote to Youth) as
“one of a half-dozen American short-story writers who count.”
Two of his short stories were included in Volumes 32 and 33.
It is fitting
that in the last anthology of this (second) millennium, World Poetry:
An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, covering forty
centuries (or four millennia), at least two Filipinos have been
included: a Filipino-Spanish (Jose Rizal) representing the 19th
century and a Filipino Poet Writting (sic) in English (Jose Garcia
Villa). Jose Rizal, as a poet and novelist, is assured of his place
in five “sites”: (a) Filipino Writing in Spanish in the
Philippines (1593-2000); (b) World Poetry in original English or
English translation (20,000 BC-2000); (c) World Literature in Spanish
(Noli Me Tangere, El Filibusterismo, “Ultimo Adios”, all
written in Spanish in the Philippines), (d) Philippine Literature
in English (1905-2000) (three poems of his); and (e) the growing
body of Filipino American writing in the US mainland, to which he
would have been dragged unwillingly if he were alive.
Some Filipino
and American critics and academics have alleged that Villa, through
his body of works and his own poetics, and through his design of
his own straightjacket, had painted himself into a corner and off
the mainstream, had been a prisoner of his time (the 40s to the
70s). Villa’s reputation in Manila and the rest of the Philippines
remained secure even during his periods of literary inactivity in
the US, starting from the late 50s up to his death. He remained
the “greatest living Filipino writer” who lived 60+ years
of his “literary self-exile” in the US, where he wavered
between his (several) identities as a “Filipino American”
writer in the US; as a Philippine-born American writer in the US;
as a Filipino writer in English from Manila who had been “in
exile” in the US until his death.
Let these three
poems in World Poetry be a fitting obituary and epitaph for a writer
whose death in 1997 was not even recorded by the “newspaper
of record.”
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