Sweets and spices

Sang nagligad nga June 2010, ginlagda sang De La Salle University (DLSU) Press ang limang e-books o electronic books, isa ka pioneering initiative sang DLSU Academic Publications Office sa pangunguna ni Dr. Isagani R. Cruz, ang premyado nga kritiko sa pungsod Pilipinas. Isa sa lima nga libro amo ang Maharang, Mahamis na Literatura sa Mga Tataramon na Bikol (Sweets and Spices in the Languages of Bikol) ni Paz Verdades Santos, literature professor sang amo man nga unibersidad.  

Matahum ang unod sang Maharang, Mahamis na Literatura sa Mga Tataramon na Bikol ni Santos kay tiniripon niya ang madamu nga mga obrang literatura sang mga kontemporaryo kag mga antiguhan nga Bikolanong awtor. 

  

The e-book can be purchased and perhaps only read through Amazon Kindle, a software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com that renders and displays e-books and other digital media.

The book offers something sweet and something spicy, as it were, that speak much of the Bikol sensibility. Maharang, Mahamis features the creative works of past and contemporary Bikol poets, fictionists and playwrights. The pieces of poetry, fiction and drama were chosen based on the individual text’s contribution to Bikol literary history, its literacy value, the peculiar Bikol turn of phrase and the distinctive Bikol identity, or as Santos herself perceived it.  

Centered on the said criteria, the book surveys representative works that could constitute Santos’s appropriation of the concept of maurag(best) and magayon (beautiful) in Bikol literature. 

  

The roster of authors in this collection is indispensable. It includes, among others, the poetry of Rudy Alano who passed away in August this year. Alano, erstwhile professor of literature at the Ateneo de Naga  helped usher in the teaching and appreciation of the vernacular literature in the said school. Alano also produced plays in Bikol in the same institution.  

The book also includes the work of Alano’s student Frank Peñones Jr., who was awarded the CCP literary grant in 1991, and whose work Bikol scholar Ma Lilia Realubit considered to have sounded “the clarion call” to revive the Bikol writing in the 1990s. 

It also features the short stories of Ana Calixto and Gloria Racelis who published in the Bikolana magazine in the 1950s. Calixto’s “Dupyas” and Racelis’s “An Doktor,” for one, read as moral tales in the post-war era countryside even as they tackle taga-bayan/taga-bukiddichotomies. 

  

Also featured are the works of the bemedaled Abdon Balde, Jr.; the prolific Jason Chancoco, whose book of Bikol poetry critiquePagsasatabuanan came out last year; the indefatigable poet Kristian Cordero who has been making waves here and there; and the Manila-based Bikol poet Marne Kilates from Daraga, Albay. It also features Gode Calleja, publisher of the Canada-based poetry folio Burak; and Estelito Jacob, former president of Kabulig, an aggregate of Bikol literati.  

  

The book also published for the first time Orfelina Tuy and Fe Ico’s “Handiong,” a full-length play written in the 1970s as a school project when they were teachers at Naga Central School. 

What is noteworthy in this collection is the inclusion of English translations of the published Bikol texts, an opportunity for Bikolano and non-Bikolano readers alike to appreciate the region's literary genius. 

  

And because the e-book can be purchased and perhaps only read through Amazon Kindle, a software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com that renders and displays e-books and other digital media, this unprecedented effort is an opportunity to get acquainted with the Bikol genius in today’s times. 

The book is virtually what we can call the life’s work of Paz Verdades Santos, featuring the products of her research in Bikol literary history and sensibility. Santos spent three decades teaching literature in Ateneo de Naga and De la Salle University. In 2003, she publishedHagkus: Twentieth -century Bikol Women Writers, which profiles the evolution of the Bikolana writer from the 1900s to the present.

In her work, Santos, who is herself not a Bikolana, but whose passion for Bikol is perhaps unprecedented, has featured the sweets (matamis) and the spices (makahang) rendered by the creative juices of past and contemporary Bikol writers which altogether lend "additional flavor to the feast of Philippine literature."