Should we be surprised that the at least anarchisant El Filibusterismo did not follow? Probably not. As Jovita Castro points out, the Lucas–Sempau Noli me tangere was by no means a faithful translation. The narrator’s seductively narquois asides to the reader were all eliminated, as well as references to Filipino folk tales and legends, and anything remotely erotic. The vitriolic attacks on the Orders were also, for reasons that are not clear, toned down.137 The effect was to turn the novel into a flatly sociologique description of “a” colonial society. If Noli me tangere had to suffer this surely well-meaning bowdlerization, we can guess that its inflammatory sequel would have been hard to swallow now that anarchism (hand in hand with syndicalism) had, in France anyway, left the age of propaganda by the deed behind it.

  AFTERGLOW EAST: MARIANO PONCE

  There are hundreds of statues of Rizal decorating the plazas of Philippine towns, crowned by an impressive monument erected in the American time—but not from an American initiative—on the spot where he was executed. In Spain and in Spanish America, it is common to find streets named after him. In the United States, however, there is little more than small statues in out-of-the-way places in San Francisco and Seattle and a larger one in Chicago. Perhaps this ignorance and indifference can be read as the world-hegemon’s unconscious response to the novelist’s own indifference to, and ignorance of, God’s country.138

  However, there is now a large, recently built, Rizal theme park in Amoy, financed mainly by wealthy Hokkien Chinese-Filipinos, whose ancestors sailed to Manila from that port. Commercial motives aside, there is something else here that is rather interesting, even touching, especially if we realize that there have been almost forty Chinese translations of Rizal’s final poem, most of them the work of Hokkienese.

  Yet probably the very first was done by none other than than Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, as early as 1901. It comes as a mild shock to realize that Liang was twelve years younger than Rizal, and only twenty-three when the Filipino was executed. Like Rizal a brilliant youngster, his wide-ranging critical articles on the state of China, revealed by its crushing defeat at the hands of the Japanese, led him to become one of the key figures in the famous “100 Days of Reform” in 1898. But when the Dowager Empress Tz’ü Hsi struck back, Liang, like many other liberals and progressives, had to flee for his life—to Japan. How he came to translate Rizal’s poem is a question that cannot yet be answered conclusively. But a few things are certain. Liang was Cantonese, not Hokkienese, and moreover had lived in Peking since his late teens. It is very unlikely therefore that Amoy played any role in his writing. From the newspapers about which Rebecca Karl writes so informatively, he would have known about Rizal’s death, but newspapers do not usually publish long poems, still less those in a language that very few readers understand.

  The circumstantial evidence looks like this. Ponce was a close friend of Rizal, and deeply committed to his memory. On October 13, 1898, he wrote to Dr Eduard Soler (presumably bilingual in Spanish and German) in Berlin, thanking him for the German translation of Rizal’s last poem and its publication in the bulletin of the Anthropologische Gesellschaft of which Rizal had been a member.139 On February 28, 1899, Ponce wrote to Apacible about plans to reprint Rizal’s works in Japan, mentioning that the cheapest printer was Shueisha, and noting that if the manuscripts were used rather than existing editions, it would involve extra work and cost more.140 We also know that as early as November 1898, well before he met Sun Yat-sen, Ponce was in touch with Chinese “reformists.” In a letter of November 19, 1898 he wrote to Apacible that the previous evening he had met “Lung Tai-kwang,” self-described as the personal secretary of K’ang Yu-wei, leader of China’s partido reformista, who arrived in Japan on May 25, and was planning a revolution to restore the “Kwan Han” (that is, Kuang Hsü) emperor to the throne.141 “Lung Tai-kwang” must have been Hokkienese, since Ponce observed that the man knew Pawa personally. Finally, as evidence of Ponce’s literary inclinations, on the whole rather rare among the ilustrados in Spain, there are three successively more irritated letters to Vergel de Dios, asking again and again for a copy of Paris, Zola’s latest novel.142 Furthermore, Ponce insisted on including the original Spanish text of Rizal’s last poem in the Japanese version of his book on the Philippine Question. One curious feature of this version is that while the main text is written in the usual mixture of Chinese (kanji) and Japanese (hiragana) scripts, the introduction is composed in pure classical Chinese. In turn this suggests that, since one or both of the translators were fluent in classical Chinese, the pair were also responsible for the Chinese translation, which came out almost simultaneously. Should this conjecture prove correct, then Liang Ch’i-ch’ao’s version was either cribbed directly from Miyamoto and Fujita, or, more likely, was a more elegant adaptation of their “Chinese” translation. The nagging partial problem is that though Liang and Ponce were certainly together in Japan, the latter seems totally unaware of this, and never mentions the former by name in his correspondence.

  In November and December 1901, perhaps prodded by Liang but more likely by the newspapers, Ma Hsün-wu published a five-part series called “Fei-lu-pin Min-tang Ch’i-yi Chi” (The Uprising in the Philippines) in the Hangch’ou Vernacular Newspaper, following up in 1903 with a biography of Rizal in Liang Ch’i-ch’ao’s influential magazine Hsin-min Ts’ung-pao, published in Japan. These articles may explain Lu Hsün’s later references to Mi último adiós and Noli me tangere, his linking of Rizal with Sándor Petöfi and Adam Mickiewicz as great poet-patriots, and a new translation of Rizal’s farewell poem by a student of Lu Hsün’s, Li Chi-yeh, in the 1920s.143 A generation later, during the 1940s, an avatar of Pawa, K’ai Chung-mei, fought in the Hua Ch’ih guerrilla units allied with the native Filipino leftwing Hukbalahap against the Japanese occupiers. In old age, returned to China, and using the nom de plume Tu Ai, he undertook a three-volume novelization of his wartime experiences. In the course of Feng-yü T’ai-p’ing-yen (Storm over the Pacific), Rizal’s farewell poem is quoted in full or in substantial chunks at least four times, while references to the First Filipino and Josephine Bracken—as a woman warrior—litter the pages.144 This all seems a little ironic in that Rizal, though partly of Hokkien descent, was not above—sometimes—a certain mild racism with regard to the Chinese. (But a long way from the virulence of Petöfi’s venom against the ethnic minorities in “Hungary.”)

  Isabelo de los Reyes and Mariano Ponce: good men now mostly forgotten even in the Philippines, but crucial nodes in the infinitely complex intercontinental networks that characterize the Age of Early Globalization.

  1. See La Revue Blanche, 11:81 (October 15, 1896), pp. 337–41. This review was originally the brainchild of two pairs of brothers, one Belgian, the other French (the cadet was only sixteen) who met in—where else?—Spa in the summer of 1889. The four secured the financial backing of the Natanson brothers, wealthy, cultivated, Polish-Jewish art dealers, who had moved to Paris in 1880. The boys published the first number in December 1889 in Liège. In 1891, however, the review moved to Paris, with the middle Natanson brother, Thadée, assuming direct charge, and in October the fortnightly started appearing in a much more lavish and elegant format. In January 1895, Félix Fénéon, recently acquitted of terrorism and sedition in the notorious Trial of the Thirty, took over the main editorial work. As we shall see, he was a committed cosmopolitan anarchist and anti-imperialist and made the journal more visibly leftwing than it had been before. La Revue Blanche’s last issue (no. 312) came out on April 15, 1903. It had always run a deficit, and now Thadée had lost a fortune by unwise investments in eastern Europe, while his beautiful Polish wife, Misia Godebska, had left him for a millionaire newspaper magnate. Elder brother Alexandre, a first-class financier and stockbroker, felt he could not afford to bear the entire financial burden alone. See Halperin, Félix Fénéon, pp. 300–14.

  2. For this, and the following paragraph I am relying on the splendidly detailed chapter VIII (“Anarquismo sin adjetivos”) in Esenwein’s Anarchist Ideology.

  3. Fernández hints at a different possibility. Tarrida’s mother, very probably a creole, had a first cousin called Donato Mármol, who came from Oriente province, and was one of the first to rally to Céspedes’s side. During the Ten Years’ War he rose to the rank of general. If Tarrida’s family left for Europe immediately after the insurrection started, this would mean that his father feared the consequences of this dangerous kin connection. La sangre de Santa Águeda, p. 25.

  4. This occurred in the midst of the Great Exposition of that year, at which the Eiffel Tower—which Joris-Karl Huysmans called a “spread-legged whore,” but Georges Seurat rather liked—was unveiled. Halperin, Félix Fénéon, p. 204.

  5. Quoted and discussed in Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, p. 202.

  6. The following account of Clémenceau’s political career (to 1900) is based primarily on Gregor Dallas, At the Heart of a Tiger: Clémenceau and his World, 1841–1929 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), esp. at pp. 30–38, 97–120, 185–7, 212–340.

  7. Fénéon’s father was a French traveling salesman and his mother a young Swiss. Halperin, Félix Fénéon, p. 21.

  8. Ibid., p. 56.

  9. Ibid., pp. 62–7.

  10. T.J. Clark, in his Farewell to an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 62, calls him the “best art critic after Baudelaire,” which is high praise.

  11. Halperin, Félix Fénéon, pp. 245–6.

  12. Ibid., p. 252.

  13. Maitron, Le mouvement, p. 137.

  14. Eugenia Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium, 1885–1898 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 113. She draws the second quotation from John Rewald, “Extraits du journal inédit de Paul Signac,” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6:36 (1949), p. 113.

  15. See the vivid reconstruction in Halperin, Félix Fénéon, pp. 3–4. It was not until many years later that he confessed what he had done to the anarchist Alexander Cohen, a cultivated Dutch Jew who had first translated Douwes Dekker’s Max Havelaar into French.

  16. David Sweetman, Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon and the Art and Anarchy of the Fin-de-Siècle (London: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 375. The translation later appeared in La Revue Blanche.

  17. Halperin’s detailed account of the trial in chapter 14 of Félix Fénéon is masterly, and wildly funny. Although the police found detonators in Fénéon’s War Department office, they could not produce any direct evidence linking the accused to the Foyot bombing.

  18. Joll, The Anarchists, pp. 149–51.

  19. Halperin, Félix Fénéon, p. 6.

  20. After La Revue Blanche closed down, Fénéon began to withdraw from political life, though in 1906 he started to contribute satirical and often moving minimalist contributions to Le Matin under the title “Nouvelles en trois lignes.” Ibid., chapter 17. He became a key figure in one of the most successful art-dealing houses in Europe, and retired in 1924. For the last twenty years of his life he lived in such complete solitude that many people assumed he was dead. Having for decades shown little interest in Marxism, he joined the French Communist Party after the end of the Great War, when he was almost sixty. He died in 1944, and but for the German occupation of Paris, would have left his magnificent art collection to the Soviet Union. Sweetman, Explosive Acts, pp. 493–5.

  21. Pissarro (and his son Lucien) were serious radicals. Camille was a Jew and born in the Danish Antilles, so he had bad experiences of the brutal suppression of a slave revolt in the Caribbean, and of anti-semitism in French schools. Degas and Renoir regularly referred to him as “the Jew Pissarro.” Ibid., p. 220.

  22. We may think of Maeterlinck primarily as the author of the misty-medievalist Pelléas et Mélisande, but he was one of the first members of the Cercle des Étudiants et Anciens Étudiants Socialistes in Brussels in 1889. As late as 1913, he was still writing for the Parti Ouvrier’s Album du premier mai, at the time of the great general strike of that year. Herbert, The Artist, p. 99.

  23. The above paragraph is largely based on ibid., pp. 9, 27–34, 67–71.

  24. Ibid., p. 162. Herbert goes so far as to say that Germinal was the first major novel directed at the working class. Zola was changing.

  25. Halperin, Félix Fénéon, pp. 272–3.

  26. Quoted in Herbert’s The Artist, p. 12.

  27. Many writers who had looked down on Zola as “bourgeois” and philistine rushed to testify on his behalf. The sentence was overturned in April by the Cour de Cassation. A second trial was then instituted, but Zola, his political objectives achieved, decamped to England where he remained till an amnesty was declared.

  28. Herbert, The Artist, p. 203. Mirbeau was then working for L’Aurore.

  29. According to the right-wing Eduardo Comín Colomer, Tarrida met the anarchist Francisco Ferrer Guardia (of whom more later), then teaching Spanish at the Lycée Condorcet, and a group of strong Cuban supporters including Clémenceau, Aristide Briand, Charles Malato, and Henri Rochefort, as well as Caribbean radicals led by Betances. See his Historia del anarquismo español (Barcelona: Editorial AHR, 1956), Tomo I, pp. 180–81.

  30. Fernández, La sangre de Santa Águeda, p. 27.

  31. Tarrida found he liked England, and eventually settled down there, becoming, alas perhaps, a Fabian. He died, too young, during the Great War.

  32. Comín’s Historia del anarquismo español, vol. 1, pp. 173–5; and Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, p. 194. Fernández, Santa Águeda, p. 31, quotes the work of Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 112–13, as claiming that 50,000 copies of the English translation of Les Inquisiteurs were distributed in Philadelphia alone.

  33. “Participa activamente en la Revolución Francesa de 1848 … revolución que se le presenta cual una revelación misteriosa” (He participated actively in the French Revolution of 1848 … a revolution which came to him like a mysterious revelation). Félix Ojeda Reyes, “Ramón Emeterio Betances, Patriarca de la Antillanía,” in Félix Ojeda Reyes and Paul Estrade, eds., Pasión por la libertad (San Juan, P.R.: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2000), p. 32.

  34. In a letter written to fellow Puerto Rican Francisco Basora, from Port-au-Prince, April 8, 1870, cited in Paul Estrade, “El heraldo de la ‘independencia absoluta’,” in Ojeda and Estrade, eds., Pasión por la libertad, p. 5.

  35. Betances lived in Haiti from February 1870 to the early autumn of 1871, helping to fight a cholera epidemic and composing his remarkable essay on Alexandre Pétion, the Haitian patriot who sheltered Bolívar when he had had to flee Venezuela, and provided crucial military support for his later comeback. Betances’s book was published in New York in 1871. A contemporary edition can be found in a collection of his major writings, edited by Carlos A. Rama and titled Las Antillas para los Antillanos (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1975). Lauding Pétion led him to some overly severe criticism of Toussaint.

  36. “Es igual yugo por yugo” (One yoke is the same as another). Estrade, “El heraldo,” p. 5.

  37. It was in New York that Betances helped found the Comité Revolucionario de Puerto Rico on July 16, 1867. The CRPR’s manifesto denounced slavery, Peninsular commercial monopolies, hunger, absence of schools, and total lack of progress in the colony. A month later he coolly swore before a court of law that he intended to become an American citizen—calculating that this would keep him out of Spanish clutches—and left for Danish St Thomas the next day! Ojeda, El desterrado, pp. 98–9.

  38. Betances himself was off hunting up guns in the Dutch colony of Curaçao, so missed the historic event.

  39. See Ojeda, El desterrado, pp. 349–51, for an interesting look at the affinities between Betances and Blanqui.

  40. Ibid., p. 221.

  41. Estrade, “El heraldo,” p. 10.

  42. Ojeda, El desterrado, p. 338.

  43. See Ventura’s letters to Rizal of February 5 and May 19, 1890, the first reporting that he has signed a two-year lease, and the second saying he is about to move in. Rizal stayed with him there in October 1891, prior to leaving for Marseilles and Hong Kong. Cartas entre Rizal y sus colegas, pp. 493–4 and 531.

  44. This important point is well brought out in Francesco Tamburini, “Michele Angiolillo e l’assassinio di Cánovas del Castillo,” Spagna contemporanea [Alessandria, Piedmont] IV:9 (1996), pp. 101–30, at p. 117. So it might be theoretically. But Cuban nationalism brought many local anarchists to Martí’s side, and Spanish nationalism subterraneanly reinforced Spanish anarchism’s distrust of Cuban (bourgeois) nationalism’s separatist utopianism.

  45. Ojeda, El desterrado, pp. 339 and 348; Estrade, “El heraldo,” p. 9.

  46. See Francesco Tamburini, “Betances, los mambises italianos, y Michele Angiolillo,” in Ojeda and Estrade, eds, Pasión por la libertad, pp. 75–82; and Ojeda, El desterrado, pp. 362–71.