Amado V Hernandez’s The Preying Birds (Mga Ibong Mandaragit, first published in 1969) is a classic of modern Filipino literature and, according to translator Danton Remoto, a required text in Filipino schools. That it is only just now appearing in an international English-language edition is something of a surprise.
The novel is the relatively straightforward tale of a patriotic fight for social justice. It starts in the last year of the Japanese occupation and continues through the first few years of the War’s aftermath and national independence. The protagonist is the pseudonymous Mando Plaridel, erstwhile guerilla, former servant in the household of wealthy landlord Segundo Montero and, after the war, crusading publisher of the newspaper Kampilan. Although the book has clear political intent, the fact that it was originally serialized in the popular weekly Liwayway magazine is an indication that Hernandez also intended it as entertainment, or at least that the politics should go down easily. The story contains swashbuckling, voyeuristic views of the lives of the upper-classes, a couple of love stories (one with Montero’s daughter Dolly, and the other with Mando’s country-lass cousin Puri), one of which is moderately salacious.

It would not be entirely accurate to call The Preying Birds an “early novel”, for the Philippines had had its own novelists for the better part of a century by this time, but nevertheless, as Remoto says in his introduction, “a Western form (the novel) has been made part of the native landscape”. It is also literally a “literary novel”, with references to a number of works from both the Philippines and overseas. Indeed, the conceit of the novel is that Mando’s crusade is bankrolled by his recovery of a treasure chest that a character had thrown into the sea at the end of independence hero and writer José Rizal’s El Filibusterismo. This is not, as Wikpedia has it, a sequel to Rizal’s novels, for the characters in The Preying Birds know full well that Rizal is an author and Noli Me Tangere and Filibusterismo are books. The connection to fiction is justified narratively by claims that the characters in Rizal’s were only lightly-fictionalized portrayals of real people and the story itself was largely true.
Mando travels the world to sell the jewels (which improbably include the “famous collar of Cleopatra found in an Egyptian pyramid” and “one of the rings of the senators and Roman nobles said to have been found among the ruins of Carthage”), whence he amasses the fortune to bankroll his newspaper. Translator Remoto finds here echoes of The Count of Monte Cristo; one might add Les Misérables. It is on the Parisian leg of this trip that he runs into Dolly Montero, the daughter of his once and future nemesis, whereupon—she not recognizing him as their former houseboy—they embark on a love affair.
The treasure is not Hernandez’s only diversion into fancy. One can often discern characters’ nature by their names. Puri’s telegraphs her virtue. The professor who is to run the new University is surnamed Sabio (“learned”). Three ladies-that-lunch are named Balbinitá Cuatrovientos, Blancanieve Cienfuegos and Maggie Siemprejoven, literally Balbinitá Four-Winds, Snow-White Hundred-Fires, and Maggie Always-Young.
There are some aspects of the novel that might surprise. Mando’s politics are hardly radical: he’s more social democrat than socialist. He believes in democracy and education; state ownership is only one solution of many and it requires the state, or rather its leaders, to be honest. He doesn’t avoid violence, but neither does consider it a solution to the problem he details. His vehicle of choice is (perhaps not coincidentally, given Hernandez’s own career) journalism.
Yet despite Mando’s goal of social justice, the morality of the story is not always as clear-cut as it might expect. Mando, once he starts disposing of the treasure, does not deny himself: he stays at the Ritz and indulges Dolly’s taste for champagne. The jewels are smuggled into the US to avoid taxes, and Mando employs agents whose clients are not always entirely salubrious. Nor is there any thought that the items of immense historical value might be better off in a museum.
In its simplicity of language, and a tendency to bend the novel to direct political and philosophical ends, the novel is reminiscent of the work of Turkish novelist Yaşar Kemal and (somewhat later) Thai writer Pira Sudham. While The Preying Birds can and should be read as an important milestone in the history of Southeast Asian literature, it can also fortunately be read and enjoyed as a saga of adventure and social derring-do, albeit one that requires a certain suspension of disbelief.
Translator Danton Remoto (himself an author of considerable repute) doesn’t mention in his Introduction that there is least one other English-language translation dating from 2021, by Estelita Constantino-Pangilinan. This edition seems not to have circulated a great deal, so Remoto’s final admonition: “World, please welcome Amado V Hernandez, the Philippine National Artist for Literature” remains apt. It should have happened some time ago, and perhaps it takes a Penguin to do it.
There are a few errors that if present in the original, the translator or editor might have discretely covered over. These include a line that the Catholic Church was “heeded by five million followers all over the earth” (off by a couple orders of magnitude), while the Roman Coliseum post-dates, not predates Christ. There are several mentions of televisions, which seem somewhat unlikely given that the story is meant to take place in the immediate aftermath of the War. It may seem churlish to mention these slips in a work more than a half-century old and sketched out while the author was in prison, but Remoto notes that he did not attempt a merely literal translation but that he touched up the text for the “reader of the twenty-first century”.
One swallow does not a summer make, but volumes like this of modern classics in translation are slowly filling in the blanks of the literary history of the region. It should have happened long ago, but better late than never.
You must be logged in to post a comment.