![]() ![]() ![]() As a Filipino, I read everything he wrote in translation - which is odd because, as a Filipino, everything he wrote defines who I am. He wrote his novels in Spanish, but his most expansive correspondence - in two volumes explaining his art, politics, and dreams of his country’s release from its then-colonizer, Spain - was written to a housebound malade imaginaire, an Austrian ethnologist named Ferdinand Blumentritt. the Fili translated as The Reign of Greed), encoded a key mystery in his Spanish text via an English anagram - deremof. ![]() An inveterate tourist, also a prankster, he spoke pretend-Japanese to confound British museumgoers in Tokyo marveled at 1880s New York but noted that the United States’ glories are “only for the whites” and, in his great 1891 novel El Filibusterismo (a.k.a. While in Berlin in 1886, he spoke to fellow medical students in the only language that united him with his German colleagues - Latin. He spoke eight languages, including three Romance and two Filipino (Tagalog and Cavite-Chavacano). ![]()
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