Translation and Revolution: A Study of Jose Rizal’s Guillermo Tell (review)

Ramon Guillermo’s Translation and Revolution: A Study of Jose Rizal’s Guillermo Tell is a work of solid scholarship. Its significance can hardly be disputed, for it is the first book-length study of Rizal’s 1886 translation of Schiller’s play, Wilhelm Tell (first performed in Weimar in 1804). It is thorough in its analysis as well as thoughtful of the historico-political and linguistic intricacies of Rizal’s translation.

Guillermo’s objective is to analyze Rizal’s translation of the Wilhelm Tell “as a living cultural and historical practice” (217), and to reveal how the original German work evolved into Tagalog through Rizal’s particular historical and especially political Weltanschauung. To show how this evolved, however, is not an easy task. The work of translation, after all, implies the appropriation and integration of what is initially unfamiliar and alien into a work that becomes intimate and meaningful in the translator’s own culture and history. This is often neither straightforward nor unambiguous, insofar as the historical and cultural, and therefore textual, renditions of certain concepts are not always immediately commensurable.

Consider the case of translating “inalienable rights.” In the introductory chapter Guillermo takes up the final chapter of El Filibusterismo, in which Padre Florentino explicitly cites a German poet (Schiller) as he comforts a dying and disconsolate Simoun. Florentino’s citation, as Guillermo indicates, is a paraphrase of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. In that paraphrase, Florentino talks about “inalienable rights, which, as the German poet says, shine ever there above, unextinguished and inextinguishable, like the eternal stars themselves.” Now “inalienable rights” can easily be translated into Spanish as inalienables derechos, as Rizal in fact did. In Rizal’s Tagalog, however, it appears as “di matingkalang katuiran” (incomprehensible reason). Guillermo finds this difference, and many others like it, significant. Here we find the central problematic of the book in what Guillermo calls the “disjunctions and differential histories” (9) of political concepts, since these would be revelatory and instructive of how Rizal had appropriated the revolutionary spirit of enlightenment Europe into his own. This book is therefore not merely a linguistic study of Rizal’s translation of a German play but, more significantly, an analysis of the ideological implications of Rizal’s translation. Simplistically, one may follow the book’s title and claim that Guillermo aims to show that Rizal’s translation of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell is indeed revolutionary.

To accomplish this aim, Guillermo undertakes a “comparison of what may be termed ‘ideological structuration’ of [Rizal’s] translation . . . to that of the original work [Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell]” (29). He performs this comparison through a computer-aided discursive analysis of both the source text and target text, which is a relatively novel method. This comparison produces vocabulary flow and hapaxa graphs that identify significant lexical clusters in both the source and target texts (62). The approach is apparently nonnormative, insofar as it makes comparisons of neither semantic content nor an interpretative schema. Instead it derives “structures of global textual coherence from global structures of lexical cohesion,” which is useful for the explicit aim of the work, what Guillermo calls a “semiotics of ideology” (77).

As regards the book’s outline, Guillermo devotes two chapters after the Introduction to investigate textual cohesion by applying “Computer-aided Discourse Analysis” (chapter 2) and a discussion of “Some Empirical Results” (chapter 3). For a theoretical framework Guillermo employs Heidrun Gerzymisch-Arbogast’s theory of translation evaluation (34), which enables him to construct and reconstruct “comparative ideologies” from the source text (Schiller’s German) and target text (Rizal’s Tagalog). In these two chapters, Guillermo explains how the computer-aided methods work to ensure the “comparability” of the source and target, as well as the ensuing empirical results.

Next he looks into textual coherence by taking up “Sociocriticism and Translational Analysis” (chapter 4) and “Interpreting Semiotic Texts” (chapter 5). In these chapters Guillermo explains the methodological inspiration...