CIRILO Bautista may have finally been proclaimed National Artist for Literature in formal Malacañang ceremonies, but his prodigious and prolific achievement seems missed by many Filipinos who after all have often been criticized as “not a reading culture.”
Not too many Filipinos know that Bautista’s major work, “The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus,” is as reinvention of the epic and is a narrative in modern idiom of Philippine history.
Born in 1941, Bautista spent much of his childhood reading through all manner of Tagalog literature and anything else he could get his hands on in Balic-Balic in Sampaloc, Manila.
He went to Legarda Elementary School and Mapa High School where he graduated valedictorian. He finished AB Literature, magna cum laude at the old UST College of Liberal Arts. In college, he was a member of the Varsitarian. He took up graduate studies at Saint Louis University in Baguio where he taught for a time. He also taught at San Beda College and De la Salle University, where he obtained his doctorate.
He received an honorary fellowship in creative writing at University of Iowa in 1969 and British Council fellowship at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1987. He was first writer to be elevated to the Palanca Hall of Fame for winning five grand prizes in 1995.
The National Artist Awards pleased him no end.
“It’s my life’s achievement in writing. It’s the highest award you can have in our country,” he said in an interview with the Varsitarian.
Throughout his career, he combed through the pages of Philippine history and reflected on the state of the nation and its people.
In his 1973 essay, “The Theory of Poetry,” Bautista said the poetry is as much a science as it is an art.
“Like all sciences, it contains within its concept a system of principles which the structure of its being, its inner force, is explicable and defensible,” he wrote.
His concept of poetry seems to govern his 30-year literary endeavor, The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, in which he revived epic poetry writing in order to provide a modern retelling of Philippine history.
“The Archipelago,” “Telex Moon” and “Sunlight on Broken Stones” comprise the trilogy.
Despite being written individually, each book connects key episodes of Philippine history.
The collection was called such in honor of the Philippines’ original name, Las islas de San Lázaro or “The Archipelago of Saint Lazarus,” as named by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521.
“The Archipelago,” the first book in the trilogy, tackles the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, beginning with a passage from Antonio de Morga’s “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas,” about the strategic location of the Philippines and how it was named after San Lazaro.
Backboned with excerpts from important figures that led to the conquest of the Philippines, it ultimately transitions to the times of Jose Rizal.
Bautista considers Rizal an inspiration for writers.
“Many people influenced me. Jose Rizal influenced me, and down into history, the other American poets, influenced me, for instance, T.S Eliot, the English writer. There are many. Anything that I read and that affected me very well has influenced me,” Bautista said.
In “Telex Moon”, Bautista tracked the simultaneous growth and degradation of the city of Manila, lamenting its subsequent fate under the tyranny of wealth, and drawing from his own views the developments and circumstances surrounding Rizal’s time as well as what was happening in the country during the Marcos era.
Bautista writes:
To say that of man
or of any categoric being,
is only to philosophize, as to
conclude that because the motorguards who
run over children in the part are doing
their duty, the levies on machineries
ought to be revoked, is only to beg
the point. The sea crawls as it ought to crawl,
dragging the seaweeds and the seastones with it.
as it should, but to conclude it retards
the growth of hibiscus and ephemera,
or clog the brains of statesmen on rainy days,
is to debase one’s own persona. To say
of this City that it is the City
of God favored by the cross-sticks and cross-lights
Aramaic, is to dress violence
in pied puppetry.
Such lines depict the city as undermined by materialism and the adverse effects of the so-called march of progress. It The “crawling of the sea” alludes, in a way, to the telex moon, which hovers over the city as a symbol of the ever-present glare of these wayward forces.
Finally, in “Sunlight on Broken Stones”, Bautista chronicled further into the progression of Philippine history and the search of Filipinos for oneness in spirit through the tumultuous periods that follow.
Manila rose up on sticks and stones: that pale
Rizal, pinned like a butterfly to his texts,
Impotent as the alphabet he rode on:
“offerings of gold and silver and brass, and
blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen,
and goat’s hair and ram’s skin dyed red, and badger’s
skin’s, and shittim wood, oil for the light, spices
for anointing oil, and for sweet incense, and
onyx stones, and also stones to be set in
blue ephod, and in blue breastplate”: the death with
their dryads and decimals, their spirit like
rubber mannequin—how long can they hold to
the letters of tombs?
Such lines strongly highlight the primary idea of the third book, the march of Philippine history on through the inception of Manila and the stormy periods in the history of the nation, setting Manila as an example.
Bautista credited the inception of the trilogy to his goal of writing an epic about the development of the Filipino soul “from the very start of Philippine history to the twentieth century.”
According to fellow poet, the late Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta, the trilogy goes beyond its depiction of history.
“The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus conveys the Filipino psyche, the ‘uniqueness and beauty of the Filipino Experience,’” she wrote.
During the UST tribute to his works, Bautista took to the aesthetics in poetry, as observed in his work.
“You see poetry, is a kind of public communication, where everything that you say is of immediacy. That’s the point with artists and art, at some point, the art becomes the life. We can’t get out of it,” said Bautista.
Bautista believed that the most fruitful way of writing a history-based epic was “to treat historical data creatively by fictionalizing them.”
“[The] objective is to make a poem out of history,” Bautista said, adding that a writer reconfigures history through artistic and aesthetic means so that it comes out as a pleasurable interpretation and not one that is contradictory to it.
