THE WORKS of the late National Artist Cirilo Bautista are treasures that continue to be celebrated and probed by Philippine readers eager to unearth their meanings.
A “cerebral poet,” as a critic puts it, Bautista is noted and perhaps criticized for verses that require very discerning readers. His works are “not for a reading culture,” a critic said.
Bautista’s former students at De La Salle University (DLSU) sat down with the Varsitarian to discuss their mentor’s works.
Ronald Baytan, director of the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center, which Bautista co-founded, admitted that even scholars like him have a hard time in comprehending the works.
“None of us could fully claim that we have fully understood his epic, and I think that is also a source of pleasure because the text is open for many possibilities,” Baytan said. “That is poetry, every time you read it, something new comes out. The journey never ends and that’s what he offers to his readers.”
In his article, “Intensities of Signs: An Interview with the Visionary Cirilo F. Bautista,” found in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature 2012, Baytan writes that for Bautista, humans are “infinitesimal beings wrestling with language. [They] articulate what cannot be articulated and…unearth what history has buried in the ’boneyard of memory.’”
Shirley Lua, member of the Manila Critics Circle that hands out the annual National Book Awards, likened Bautista to a “minstrel from the medieval age” and added his poems must be read aloud.
“Those who engage in the verbal joust, when they recite, you would understand because of the musicality of the language,” she explained. “The images will come alive because of the word. Because you can clearly depict the images, then you can see the kind of a context, of a world, of a city that he imagined.”
“His famous definition of poetry is a monkey on your back, and you need to write to keep the monkey calm,” said five-time Palanca winner John Iremil Teodoro.
Trilogy of St. Lazarus
Bautista’s “Trilogy of St. Lazarus” is a rendition of the Philippine history in epic form. It is called as such in reference to the name Ferdinand Magellan gave to the country before, “Las islas de San Lázaro” or “St. Lazarus’ Islands.”
Lua said that through his epic “The Trilogy of St. Lazarus,” Bautista “reinvented history.”
“When you read his works, they are very sharp—his insights, perceptions, the way he reinvented history,” Lua said.
“It is a kind of epic that you can be proud of as a Filipino. [If] Derek Walcott has Omeros, we have the Trilogy of Saint Lazarus,” Baytan said.
Lua said Bautista’s epic telling of Philippine history showed his erudition.
“He studied history, you can say that many of these things [are] capture[d] images of the era. There are allusions present, there are historical facts that he refers to,” she said.
In “Sunlight on Broken Stones,” for instance, Bautista used the voice of Ferdinand Marcos as a self-proclaimed “decorated war hero.”
… Why then should I hide
anything when I have nothing to hide? Look
at the medals that fill my chests, and the bright
citations embracing my walls—are they not
the categorical imprimatur on
my legitimacy?
The epic trilogy consists of “Archipelago,” “Telex Moon,” and “Sunlight on Broken Stones.”
“The Archipelago,” originally published in 1970 by the San Beda Review, retells Philippine history, from Magellan’s so-called discovery of the country to the trial of Rizal.
“Archipelago is a unique way of telling history. It contains elements of high modernism, complexity,” Baytan said.
Lua commended Bautista’s use of three major voices in his epic: Magellan, Rizal, and Miguel López de Legazpi.
“It is like a parallel universe, something that is looking down on us. Very difficult, but he is still able to show the different voices and portray them in a good manner,” she said.
The late literary giant Ophelia Dimalanta reviewed Telex Moon, originally published in 1981 by the DLSU Publishing House, at Philippine Studies, a refereed journal from Ateneo de Manila University, in 1983. Dimalanta wrote that the book is both “intellectual and anti-intellectual.”
“The reader is baffled, bewildered, and is oftentimes badly battered, as he struggles through lyric and lore, through a welter of allusions drawn from the poet’s vast readings,” Dimalanta writes.
Baytan, in accordance with Dimalanta, critiqued how Bautista “batters” his readers with his sonic plays and obsession with music.
In “Telex Moon,” Bautista employed a “sonic effect” with “s,” “x,” “c” and “k” sounds:
The sex of telex brings the grex an ax,
tells exactly the factly lack of lex
though in electric stockrooms it is rex;
its shocky hair that shakes the air mirific
“Sunlight on Broken Stones,” published in 2000 by University of the Philippines Press, suggests hope to the beloved yet broken country of the poet through “straightforward imagery”:
Keep the books now
the won patrimony
all letters not fetters
to announce the anthem
to the four winds
Keep eternal
account of our shared griefs
and pains gaiety and goals
gold lost now recovered
birthright returned
“Broken stones, because our history is in ruins. Meanwhile, the sunlight is the image for hope,” Teodoro said. “As a poet, he saw all the negative things that transpired in our country. But his trilogy’s ending is still full of hope.”
Dimalanta on Bautista
Writing in 2006, the late Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta said readers should be mindful not only of Bautista’s texts but also “subtexts.”
“For Bautista enjoins his readers to read subtexts more than text, read what is not there, which is essentially, the poem,” said Dimalanta (“The Lyric as History,” from The Ophelia A. Dimalanta Reader; UST Publishing House).
In his 2006 poetry collection by the DLSU Press, Believe and Betray, in fact, Bautista asked that one should read “more to the nothing between the silence[s] more than the silence.”
Bautista called Things Happen, published by USTPH in 2014, his “best poetry collection.” Poems in the volume tackle simple things, which the poet takes to another level, said Lua.
Lua particularly commended the poem “Style,” which talks about how the young Cirilo saw her mother “mastered” the art of smoking cigarette while doing their laundry:
In our village not known for unusual things, it was
short of a miracle, the ember not dying
in her mouth and her palate not getting burned.
Style is the perfection of design, a habit
of usage that strives after elegance,
“He has keen perception of the things around him,” said Lua. “It shows that he can turn a lot of things that are ordinary around him into poetry to the level of the sublime.”
What made Bautista even more famous is his versatility in writing; he is also a master of the Filipino language.
Baytan took a swipe at those who knew Bautista only as a writer in English.
“Unfair for people to think that Bautista only writes in English, because he is a bilingual writer,” he said. “I like the videos about him, where they quote his poetry in Filipino or Tagalog because that is the true picture of makata.”
The novel “Ang Galaw ng Asoge” and the poetry collection “Sugat ng Salita” are some of the works written by Bautista in Filipino.
Moreover, Bautista specialized not only in poetry but also in literary criticism. His important work in criticism is “Words and Battlefields: A Theoria on the Poem,” published in 1998 by DLSU Press.
“Words and Battlefields: A Theoria on the Poem,” for Baytan, is “complex” and requires readers to have wide vocabulary.
Teodoro considered Words and Battlefields as Bautista’s “most intellectual work,” a “key contribution” to Philippine poetry.
“I like when he said a poem is not written in a vacuum,” said Teodoro. “His main idea is that poetry is art, a battlefield that you enter because you are wrestling with words.”
Before his death last May 6, Bautista wrote his last poetry collection, “In Many Ways,” published by USTPH last December.
The book is composed of 100 poems, written from 2012 to 2016, which tackle such themes as suffering, pain, war and love.
