12-13-2017, 08:56 PM
(12-13-2017, 08:24 PM)shemthepenman Wrote: there are 13 titles on wikipedia’s list of national epics for the philippines (7 poetry 6 prose).Lol, wikipedia.
Also, I checked on what wikipedia had to say on that before posting that. Only two of those epics I could actually consider as "national epics", Ibong Adarna and Florante at Laura, especially since they're the ones we're actually forced to read in school. I'd say that in terms of how its story captures the national ethos, the former beats the latter, while in terms of aesthetic quality, the latter beats the former -- but really, both were written in Tagalog, at a time when Tagalog wasn't considered essentially synonymous to Filipino (in fact, when Filipino didn't exist yet: Filipino is a language invented for the sake of a national identity, although by "invented" what I really mean is "copied wholesale from Tagalog"), while the rest of those epics aren't in typical consideration because they are not, which is a relatively arbitrary decision, considering the other works that are mandated reading in school, Rizal's two novels, are read in translation. Couple that with just how important Rizal is generally considered over here (though no laws outright say so, he's our national hero, being one of three non-religious persons to have a legally mandated holiday, and the only one to have a law explicitly ordering the study of his life and works), and there really isn't much comparison.
ADDENDUM the epics I considered here were the epic poems. As for the the prose epics, the only bits of mandated reading there are, again, Rizal (although I think we were forced to read some of Lope K. Santos and Amado V. Hernandez, just not those novels, and never with the same level of emphasis), and Maragtas (from what I understand) falls into the same category as the non-Tagalog epics I discussed, while the others are decidedly influenced by Rizal's works (I think Mga Ibong Mandaragit even uses them as a plot device, at least judging by, lol, wikipedia).