The ones we do have are obsolete and hardly ever read. Except for Filipino, which is the national language, and English, the co-official language, translations of Rizal’s novels in other Philippine languages are almost unheard of. Despite their status as foundational novels, the Noli and Fili have not been translated to many other languages of the Philippines. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has the French translation by Henri Lucas and Ramón Sempau under the title Au pays des moines ( In the Land of Monks ). We also have the Chinese translation by Se Fen. Poblete and by Benjamin de la Fuente, Hiligaynon by Ulpiano Vergara, Kapampangan by Pedro Manankil, and Cebuano by Juan Kijano. On the other hand, translations of the Noli in Philippine languages at U-M include Tagalog/Filipino by Pascual H. Guerrero’s The Lost Eden and The Subversive, Jorge Bocobo’s Noli me tangere, described as an “unexpurgated” translation, Camilo Osias’s El filibusterismo, Jovita Ventura Castro’s Noli me tángere and The Revolution, Soledad Lacson-Locsin’s Noli me tángere and Subversion, and Harold Augenbraum’s Touch Me Not and El filibusterismo. Other notable English-language translations of the Noli and Fili in U-M collections are León Ma. We also have Charles Derbyshire’s The Social Cancer, first published in 1912, and a 1931 edition of Derbyshire’s translation of the Fili, titled The Reign of Greed. The known oldest English-language translation of the Noli is An Eagle Flight, an adaptation published in 1900 in New York. Since Spanish has never been spoken as a majority language in the Philippines, the only way for Filipino readers to understand the Noli and Fili was to read them in translation. Rizal’s two novels are the most translated works in the Hispanofilipino canon.

This illustration above from the cover of the 1961 edition of Noli me tángere depicts an iconic scene from the novel, where the protagonist Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra attacks Padre Dámaso after the Spanish priest taunts the memory of Ibarra’s dead father.

Jose rizal writing el filibusterismo