“The river’s tent is broken/Wasak ang kubol ng dagat”: The Modern and the Nation in Bienvenido Lumbera’s Ang Pagas na Lupain

In 1971, Philippine National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera translated one of the most outstanding examples of world literature, T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem, The Waste Land, into Filipino. At the time, Lumbera had just earned his PhD from Indiana University as a Fulbright scholar. Naturally, his colonial education and aesthetic preference shaped his approach as a critic and scholar. However, Lumbera’s “radical transformation” became evident in 1968, in the midst of growing discontent with the neocolonial government (Veric 140). This paper underscores, therefore, the centrality of translation in world literature, especially in the context of a single “world literary system” (Moretti 56). Lumbera’s translation of Eliot’s poem was published in Ateneo de Manila University’s Katipunan journal, as a response to Alejandro Abadilla’s critique that Filipino poetry was still trapped in 19th century romantic modes. Ang Pagas na Lupain thus demonstrated Lumbera’s reworking of the Western notion of modernity into a specific type of Filipino “modernism” that challenged the prevailing romantic tradition reminiscent of Balagtasismo and New Critical influences from the West. Produced in the years leading to the First Quarter Storm, the poem marked “a revolutionary period in the history of activism in the Philippines, introducing a new literary ideology” that not only “challenged the hegemony of New Criticism in critical writing in the Philippines” (Lumbera 168), but also captured young Filipino poets’ disillusionment with the elusiveness of social change. Lumbera’s notion of the modern was one that not only assimilated traditional Tagalog poetry, and extolled “individual style” (Alvarez-Tardio 176), but was also committed to national self-determination. This rereading of Lumbera’s Ang Pagas na Lupain is also resituated within the context of WREC’s theory of combined and uneven development, which presupposes a world-system that is one and unequal, consisting of the “core” and “periphery,” whereby capitalism produces an uneven single world-literary system (8). In this context, Ang Pagas na Lupain invokes readers to recognize the poem’s continued relevance to contemporary events, proof of Lumbera’s effective transposition of the temporal nuances of the work through his choice of historical and literary allusions, moving between and across time, as a “literary registration of modernity” (WREC 17).