A New Demand for Old Texts: Philippine Metrical Romances in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Two of the most distinct characteristics of the metrical romances of the Philippines are anachronism and displacement. Inconsistencies in time and place are so common in the verse narratives that they are practically a convention of the genre in Philippine poetry. Filipino authors evidently took great liberties in presenting foreign characters, fantastic plots, and ‘exotic’ settings due, perhaps, to extravagant imaginations or, more likely, to limitations in knowledge of the larger world outside the Philippine archipelago. As the Filipino historian Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera describes the romances:

Not only are they ignorant of, and do they falsify, the face of the earth, but the planetary system itself suffers a radical change. Palms and tamarind trees grow in the vicinity of Moscow; Palestine and Macedonia are covered with prairies ... and whales appear in the Mediterranean. Events which begin in the morning in Macedonia end in the most natural manner in the afternoon of the same day in a place in Babylonia; and a princess of Aragon, captured early in the morning in Sicily, converses at midnight and without an interpreter with a Moro of Samarcand.¹