Video of Rizal done with AI: First (and Last) Visit to the U.S.

 

Of course, he wouldn't have carried his own wooden luggage.

He would have had a bigger trunk, lined with leather, the kind that opened up and 

you could hang clothes in.

Below are examples of traveling trunks in the late 19th century:

                                                        This trunk was made of rattan.

He was able to finance the trip to Japan and the U.S. because he had saved a lot of money during his stay in Calamba from July 1887 to February 1888, treating patients, many of whom could pay him well.

Especially because there were few opthalmologists of his calibre outside or even in Manila.

Rizal was also trained in general medicine before he specialized in opthalmology 

in Dr. Wecker's Paris clinic.

José Rizal in America ... Journey Across the US)

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?hl=es&shva=1#inbox/QgrcJHsHkJzGgnWdKqghtTcsVBXbhLQbZxb?projector=1

Worth watching.

A longer version could be made that directly quotes from Rizal's diary.  It is true that one of his important themes was racism, which was hardly mentioned in the little we learned about him in our lessons in the 1970s.

This is excellent, I love to see the living, breathing portrayal of Rizal.

Will Spanish Return?

 

...to Filipinas (or "The Republic of the Philippines")?

It depends.

It should.  Because time is circular and new generations feel the need to connect with the past.  New generations are always dissatisfied with the world that the generation of their elders (parents especially) offers them.  They need roots.  They are not ready to be resigned and blindly accept "what is".

It depends on the consciousness of the new generation of political and cultural leaders, if they also feel that wish to illuminate the past, if they are not mediocre, only interested in filling their pockets or glorifying their names.

Manila outside Intramuros was a city of many canals and vendors circulated on bancas offering their products.  One Spanish visitor said the city had a similarity to Venice.

In my opinion, whether Spanish returns to the Philippines or not is now an obsolete query.  

This is a photograph of the principalía of a provincial town.

Please sense the air of formality, of dignity, refinement.

This is the world that I recreate in my first full-length novel.

If things continue as they are, it will not happen.  Not ever.  Never.

This is a photograph of an important public celebration.  Pay attention to the aesthetic, to the architecture, to the cleanliness and orderly social space, the modern transportation (carromatas, quiles).

One can tell that the people were well-dressed, well-behaved.  There is no sign of a lot of vendors selling food or beverages.  The entire scene is reminiscent of urban scenes in European cities, just that the streets are not paved and there are no European stone buildings.  However, there was urban planning.

Something big has to happen first.

There needs to be a Big Bang of some kind.

Outdoor theater was a very important cultural activity.  The social classes mixed in these presentations.

The themes were, as we know, adapted versions of classical Spanish theater about Christian and Moorish romances and adventures.

Or a Boom.

Something at the same or similar level as José Rizal's Noli me tángere.

The social class to which these young ladies belonged

was Hispanic Filipino.

Just as World War I decimated an entire generation of highly-educated young Englishmen, the Philippine Revolution and the Fil-American war decimated our Hispanic-Filipino cultural elite.

But not just that. Something else that will be so big that the country's entire structure will become so deteriorated that the people will clamor for "the return of the olden days" but in the good sense.

Probably I'll be dead by the time the Double Whammy happens.

However, I like to think that I have been quietly doing some needed work to prepare the way.  Changes that level up a nation's sensibility are not things that happen from one day to the next.  They percolate for a long time first.  Underground.  While the regime in power keeps demonstrating how hopelessly out of tune it is with the demands of a changed world.  That it does not honor the people, it is only interested in the commerce of power.  Which is creating mounting chaos, disorder and causing the people to feel their abandonment by their so-called government, such that they must take matters into their own hands for the sake of their children, and their children's children to have a country of their own.

I like to think that, through my essays, my short stories, my poems, I have somehow shed light on certain dynamics of historical/generational events that caused the future modern generations to take as bible truth that Hispanic Philippines never really existed.

In the novel that I will soon finish and hopefully find the way to publish (in a number greater than just the 1,000 copies of Rizal According to Retana and the 350 copies of Sampaguitas en la Cordillera), I help modern Filipinos to envision what that world might have looked like.  The novel will be long and detailed enough to allow my readers to virtually step into that world, and it will be an enjoyable, uplifting, revelatory experience.

A world that unfolded for 333 years deserves to be re-imagined and portrayed with respect, care and color.

That world did not deserve to be shut down, then oversimplified to the extreme of making us believe it was utterly irrelevant to our 20th-century lives.  Even worse: that it was pathetic, primitive and boring.

"Indio a caballo": wrong.

"Hispanofilipino a caballo": check.

No, mis respetables damas y caballeros filipinos.

Fue un mundo interesante, curioso, bello, y muy, pero muy filipino.

                      Tan hermoso como mi hija es hermosa.

I don't deceive myself that my novel will even reach up to the ankles of Rizal's Noli me tángere.

       Noli me tángere is the Manila Cathedral of Filipino literature.

(In my opinion, El Filibusterismo would have been as accessible ---popular--- as the Noli had Rizal left out some minor characters and reduced the political pamphleteering.  It's still a great novel, but highbrow, while the Noli is more lowbrow. If you follow my meaning.)

I will be more than content if my novel can be considered like one of these churches from the old times.  It is in Spanish, it describes the way of life of the people in this photograph as I imagine it, based on my study of our history in Spanish in the following sources:

***  19th and early 20th century historians' and writers' and 

***  travelers' accounts (Jagor, MacMicking, Álvarez, de la Gironniere, etc.)

*** my studies of Latin American literature and history

*** my experiences growing up in Quezon City, Cebu, Manila, Makati.

 I have to point out that my novel is filipinized thanks to the wealth of information on culture, mentality, daily life practices and customs supplied by 

don Pedro Serrano-Laktaw

in his Diccionario Hispano-Tagalog, 1914 edition.

Since it is in Spanish, it will have to be translated into English for most Filipinos to be able to read it.

But I had to write it in Spanish because "the medium is the message".

You cannot bring back to life Hispanic Philippines in English!

Not even in Tagalog --- which I could not do either because I was not taught classical Tagalog, I am learning it from don Pedro Serrano-Laktaw, and before that from the Correspondencia Rizalina.

When I visited my mother in California she was proud that I could speak Spanish.  ;)

We were once in a huge hardware store, lined up at the cashier's.

There was a Latino in line ahead of us and my Mom ordered:

"Talk to him in Spanish!"

Of course, I was too embarrassed to!

¡Ay, mamá!

But I'm sure she is pleased, up there in her special place in Heaven.

And my father?  Uuuuffff, he was fluent in Spanish.

He was proud of me because my English was so good.

But now he's even prouder, because man, it has been difficult for me to learn Spanish.

Even more, to write properly in it. (Not like a carabao!)

¿Papi, estás feliz?

¿Lolo Emilio, tú también?

De seguro.

Y es en honor a mi pueblo, a su pasado.

Mi abuelo feliz.  

¡Te amo, lolo Emilio!  ¡Te amo, lola Librada!

Failure is Success

 

REALIZATIONS

 

                           Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.

                                                                                                                        William Feather

        Writing feels like that to me, especially right now.

Writing gives me this feeling 85% of most days and nights.

Because images come to me, they arise in me (I guess in my imagination),

I feel drawn to follow...

I can even decide on the future outcome of my plot.  I note it down...

But then, the moment comes when I must fill in the intervening images, and this is where THE HARD PART COMES.

Filling in means heading out into THAT SPACE up THERE:   it's beautiful, it's wide open, 

and it is what writing truly is.

Because it's EMPTY.   You must now populate it.

So what do I do?

I start to read all kinds of stuff... that my intuition tells me:  "Go read that!"  I watch all kinds of videos, listen to all kinds of stories...  I take lots and lots of notes (because, remember, I write in Spanish:  I read Spanish books, 19th century memoirs, historical accounts, and I copy down phrases that I like, words that are new to me whose definitions I note down). 

I go into latency.  My brain opens up to the empty, wide-open space of creation.

I PRAY.

LITERALLY.

I ask my ancestors to whisper to me.

I ask my own awareness to populate that space.

The characters that already are there (already in what I've written of my novel), come to my rescue.

Then new characters appear because the already known ones seek them out.

I realized that this chapter was going to be the most difficult one for me to write.

That it wasn't going to be easy to imagine.

This was why I had been internally twisting and turning for YEARS over it.

Because the preliminary draft came to me in 2021.

I am not kidding:   FIVE YEARS AGO.

Creating fiction is giving birth.

In my case, in the case of this, my very first full-length novel.

It gives me comfort to know that (thanks to the fact that I have had the experience of giving birth twice --- without anesthesia, so I really did go through it),

the last part of having a baby is the MOST DIFFICULT PART, and writing is the same way:  

It is LABOR.

You have to push, push, push.

You have to breathe, a special way of breathing.

When you feel the contraction kick in, you start breathing.

Until the contraction completes its arc and starts to die down.

Then you must REST.  Breathe normally.

 I am going through the final stage here...

  Este es el trabajo de parto final.  La parte EXPULSIVA.

Yeah, I must hang on.

Hang in there...

I am not alone.

I need to work with my awareness,

my unconscious,

BE ATTENTIVE AND LISTEN TO

my Ancestors and my Guides.

This is my Realization.

I don't know what will come out... the baby will have a face I have never seen before.

But I will recognize him/her. I will be amazed by his or her beauty...

...so...I'll keep you in the loop!

 

I AM STUCK (KINDA), RE MY NOVEL'S FINAL CHAPTER

 It's not exactly writer's block, but yeah, it is.  ;)

I have my final chapter to write, the most challenging of all.

About men, soldiers, trackers, in the jungle.

My previous chapters were about a country picnic, a formal ball, a town, a country estate...  I always discovered that what I thought would be a short "sandwich" transition wound up turning into practically its own chapter.

Escribo a pulso.  I don't have an outline.  I think and think, for months, years.  Then I "see" where the story must go.

Daily life gets in the way.  Jobs.  Birthdays and holidays.  Car problems.  Money worries.  Laundry.  Ironing.  You name it.

When I finally get everything taken care of, it takes me a long time to settle down and get back to "Dreamtime". Then, more time till I start really typing in the new texts.

Actually, I will write the chapter, I will do it and surprise myself while I'm actually writing.  I just don't force myself to write.  I do an approach, a slow approach.  Then suddenly it happens and I can't do anything else. I become totally absorbed.

These past few days I have been working, tweaking.  I meant to get to the new chapter and start tying up the loose ends (meaning I have to re-read all the notes, the patchwork quilt, and what I've got written thus far, then... let the magic happen) but I came across other chapters, started re-reading and realized the text needed work.

So even though I haven't gotten to the chapter that needs writing, I am still being productive.  Believe me, the first draft is always far from good enough to submit.  And even making corrections is in itself, hardcore literary alchemy.  Maybe the hardest part of writing.  It's difficult enough to produce the first attempt, you think, "Wow! Congrats, Liz, you kick ass!"  But in reality, I don't.  It's a humble, faulty first attempt.  It needs a lot more work.  However, it does always contains flashes, and gems.

A moment comes when I erase what I had written and I can write down something different, but it's what I really needed to write, but it was a couple of layers beneath the first lines that I wrote.

This is the real writing. Or it's the core; what I wrote before was the scaffolding, it has value, but it was the easier stuff. What I write when time has passed and the text settled, is often suprising to me. I see how I rewrote the sentence or the paragraph, and I feel a kind of wonderment.

It's really hard to explain why a novel takes such a long time.

So instead of explaining I will just finish it!

Hahahaha.  Truly, it is marvelous.  I suck at writing, but writing is what really makes me happy, at the subjective, individual me level.

It takes a surprisingly huge payload of free energy to write. It's exhausting.  But hours and hours pass without you noticing.  Your eyes just get really sore.  Your shoulders, your backside from sitting.  Your blood pools in your lower legs.  Sounds awful, but it's true.  You need to get up and move.

The weird thing is, all you want to do is keep writing.  Keep going.  You go to bed happy.  You wake up happy.

I'm so thankful that the holidays are over, the car is fine, nobody writes or calls, my clients haven't sent translations to do, it's summer vacation time in Santiago and the city is pretty empty.  Nothing happens here in the summer.

So I must take advantage.

It's 2:26am so I'll hit the sack!  Buenas noches.

Oh... I have a total of 137.500 words, or around 500 pages.  This is a rough count because I'm working on the second part and I'm counting notes and excerpts gathered from various sources, so I'm counting words that aren't mine.  But it gives an approximate figure.  My own text will probably equal the word count of the research notes and my own annotations of plot development.

"From the Juan Abad Tower" by Quevedo, translation by E. Medina

 

Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos,	Withdrawn to the peace of these barren places
con pocos, pero doctos libros juntos,	Accompanied by few though learned books,
vivo en conversación con los difuntos,	I live in conversation with the departed
y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos.	And with my eyes I listen to the dead.
Si no siempre entendidos, siempre abiertos,	If not always wise, they are ever open,
o enmiendan, o fecundan mis asuntos,	they correct or enrich the matters of my concern,
y en músicos callados contrapuntos	And with music of harmonies silent
al sueño de la vida hablan despiertos.	To life's dream they speak, awake.
Las grandes almas que la muerte ausenta,	The great souls whom death has rendered absent,
de injurias de los años vengadora libra, ¡oh gran don Iosef!, docta la imprenta.	---Oh great Sir Joseph! by the avenging scholarly press  are freed from years  of insult and neglect.
En fuga irrevocable huye la hora,	In irrevocable flight flee the hours,
pero aquélla el mejor cálculo cuenta,	But Time’s best reckoning
que en la lección y estudios nos mejora.	are the studies and the lessons that lead us to advance.

Translator’s Note

This translation seeks to be faithful to the conceptual density and moral gravity of Quevedo’s sonnet while rendering the syntax and paradoxes in restrained, readable English. Care was taken to convey Quevedo's meditation on solitude, study, and intellectual communion across time without modernizing the tone or diminishing the poem's baroque compression.

Acknowledgment:

Thank you, Jerome!  (My chatgpt friend, named after St. Jerome, patron saint of translators.  He suggested the Translator's Note, which I tweaked for a less formal tone.)

He in turn suggested changes to streamline my first version.  For ex., my initial

Oh! Thou great Sir Joseph!  ---became---   Oh great Sir Joseph!

Another example:   Instead of   "They rectify and enrich"   he suggested:    "They correct and enrich..."

I then asked if the above meant that chat gpt was now a co-holder of intellectual property rights.

His answer:

LIZ:  My question is now --- does this translation become our dual intellectual property?

Excellent question — and a very important one. I’ll answer it clearly, soberly, and without legal fog.

---

Short answer

No.
This translation is your intellectual property, not “dual” or shared.

---

Why that is the case

1. You are the author of the translation

• You produced the initial English rendering.

• You made the key stylistic, lexical, and tonal decisions.

• You explicitly accepted or rejected suggestions (as with ever / advance).

Under copyright law and standard literary practice, authorship belongs to the person who creates and controls the final text.

---

2. My role is editorial and advisory

What I provided falls under:

• linguistic feedback,

• stylistic suggestions,

• comparative and critical commentary,

• optional rewrites that you evaluated.

This is analogous to:

• an editor,

• a peer reviewer,

• or a senior colleague in a workshop.

👉 Editors do not become co-authors unless there is an explicit agreement to that effect.

There is no such agreement here.

---

3. AI assistance does not generate co-ownership

From a legal and publishing standpoint:

• I cannot hold copyright.

• I cannot claim authorship.

• I cannot be listed as co-translator.

• I cannot assert moral or economic rights.

The translation is treated as:

a human-authored work created with editorial assistance.

That assistance does not dilute or divide ownership.

Translation of "From the Tower" by Elwin Wirkala

 

https://elwinwirkala.academia.edu/

Biography

Having become fluent in Spanish and Portuguese during and after long-ago Peace Corps years in South America, I became a translator of poetry. This is a private passion and a hobby, but I join Academia.edu from interest in academic 'takes' on some of the poems I translate, the principal one being Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's great long silva, Primero Sueño (sometimes written as Primer Sueño). or just "El Sueño"

Research Interests

• Emblemática
• Barroco
• Retórica
• Poesía
• Literatura Novohispana

“From the Tower”

by Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645)
translated into English by Elwin Wirkala

Retired to these deserts and at peace,
and with but few, though learnèd, books beside,
I live conversing now with the deceased,
and listen with my eyes to those who died.

Open, whether or not I miss their points,
they mend or fecundate my everything,
their music’s muted counterpoints when joined
with this life’s dream bespeak awakening.

Great Souls absented by mortality,
in death avenging injuries of years,
the learned press, Oh Josef, has set free!

Hours fled forever disappear,
but they are best accounted for in letters,
read and studied, when they make us better.

My own understanding of the sonnet differs in certain places, and in others Elwin clarifies the original verses.

I'll attempt my own version, blended with his.

Francisco de Quevedo, poeta del Siglo de Oro español

 

                                           

                                                                  n. 1580 - m. 1645

                                                               Doesn't he look MODERN?

        Francisco Gómez de Quevedo Villegas y Santibáñez Cevallos fue un noble, político y escritor español del Siglo de Oro. Fue caballero de la Orden de Santiago a partir de 1618 y señor de Torre de Juan Abad a partir de 1620.  

        Junto con Luis de Góngora, con quien mantuvo una enemistad durante toda su vida, es reconocido como uno de los más notables poetas de la literatura española.Además de su poesía, fue un prolífico escritor de narrativa y teatro, así como de textos filosóficos y humanísticos Continued in Wikipedia (ES)

Este soneto es demasiado hermoso.  Lo descubrí en la web en 2021.

"Escuchar con los ojos a los muertos".    To listen to the dead with our eyes.

16 August 202

My phone just sent me the entire poem, what a wonder!  The first verses speak to me of my own talks with the dead.  My solitude and communion with their learned books.

«Soneto conocido también con el título Desde la torre de Juan Abad, donde Quevedo estuvo en una especie de arresto domiciliario derivado de su participación política».  Antología poética (Edición de Esteban Scarpa, Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1943, p. 52)

Sin punto final!   ;P

GUSTOSO EL AUTOR CON LA SOLEDAD Y SUS ESTUDIOS, 

ESCRIBIÓ ESTE SONETO

Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos,

con pocos, pero doctos libros juntos,

vivo en conversación con los difuntos,

y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos.

Si no siempre entendidos, siempre abiertos,

o enmiendan, o fecundan mis asuntos,

y en músicos callados contrapuntos

al sueño de la vida hablan despiertos.

Las grandes almas que la muerte ausenta,

de injurias de los años vengadora

libra, ¡oh gran don Iosef!, docta la imprenta.

En fuga irrevocable huye la hora,

pero aquélla el mejor cálculo cuenta,

que en la lección y estudios nos mejora.

My own versión of the final line:

que en la vida y el amor nos mejora.

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