You Doubt That The Boy Jose Rizal Wrote At 8 The Poem “Sa Aking Mga Kabata” – I Doubt That You Have Realized That He Had Developed His Multiple Intelligences!

In public service, I teacher (and self-taught writer) say. “You need History, you need Published Knowledge Research – and you need to think to understand it all!” And that’s whether you are actually and/or virtually teaching in or out of school. Like Sunday in Manila, 19 March 2023, I see a sharing of Evelyn P Antonio (whom I know is a lover of “Pilipino” as national language), yesterday’s Facebook post, “The Legacy Of A Fake Rizal Poem” by Jose Victor Torres. The poem is “Sa Aking Mga Kabata” (“To Kids Of My Own Time” – my translation). And I see that here is Rizal still being completely misunderstood and/or misinterpreted.

In summary, Mr Torres claims all these:

(1)     There is no original manuscript; therefore, its origin is doubtful.

(2)     Rizal did not write that poem – somebody else did.

(3)     He could not have written it at 8 years of age.

(4)     In that poem, Rizal compared Tagalog with Latin, English, Spanish. 

(5)     The letter “k” did not appear in Tagalog orthography until many years later.

My rebuttal:

#1 – Nonsequitur. I honestly can claim that I have written myself about 10,000 essays and I have no originals of thousands of them! (I have blogged them, yes.)

#2 – Authorship. There is no proof that somebody else wrote it.

#3 – Age, Ability & Assistance. Remember that the boy Rizal had a learned mother: Teodora  Alonso Realonda “came from a financially able family and studied at the Colegio de Santa Rosa in Manila, just like her mother who was well-bred and had an educational background in the subjects of mathematics and literature” (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org). So! Her little son could have written a draft, and she could have helped him finish it into the poem “Sa Aking Mga Kabata.”

#4 – Comparing languages. Read again the original stanza: “Ang wikang Tagalog tulad din sa Latin / sa Ingles, Kastila at salitang anghel / sapagka’t ang Poong maalam tumingin / ang siyang naggawad, nagbigay sa atin.” My translation: “The Tagalog language is like Latin / English, Spanish, and angelic tongue / because God who has the wisdom / is He who gave to us did assign.”

Definitely, the boy’s poem compares Tagalog with other languages only as far as wisdom is concerned. No single language in the world can claim knowledge singularly!

#5 – Dating language partially. The letter “K” could have been simply “introduced” into the title years after the poem was written. As simple as that!

Look at the above “Neurodiversity” presentation of 9 images referring to 9 multiple intelligences (MI) as according to Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. Applying MI, we can appreciate how Rizal was smarter than most of us Filipinos: agriculturist, artist, businessman, debater, doctor, engineer, linguist, novelist, poet, taxonomist, teacher, and translator.
(“Neurodiversity” from amazon.com, original “Jose Rizal” from slideshare.net)

Shouldn’t we all try to be as many times smart as Jose Protacio Rizal, our National Hero, showed us? Asking like a friend!@517