National Book Awards

Here are the last two winners of the 22nd National Book Awards handed out by the Manila Critics Circle in cooperation with NCCA, NBDB, Primetrade Asia, and the Alfonso T. Ongpin Foundation.

The National Book Award for Best Design was given to Silence, by Randolf S. David and Jaime Zobel, designed by Francisco Dopy Doplon (Ayala Foundation). The citation (translated from Filipino) went this way: "According to the text of Randolf S. David, silence is not the absence of sound, but the presence of grace, of solitude, of humanity, and of divinity. In the photographs of Jaime Zobel, on the other hand, moves silence, full of life, full of what we otherwise would call sound or activity. Francisco Dopy Doplon grasped the irony of silence internalized by the writer and the photographer. Through the use of different kinds of paper, large white spaces, varying fonts, and different positions of photographs on pages, the book itself becomes busy with silence."

The grand prize, the Publisher of the Year Award, was won by the University of the Philippines Press, cited this way (translated from Filipino): "For 2002, the list of finalists for the National Book Awards was not dominated by any one publisher. But only one publisher may be said to have pioneered in different ways of publishing books that were not expected to sell at a profit, but had nevertheless to be printed in order to move the country forward. Publishers have the responsibility to reach their intended markets. These markets include not just those that can write and those that can read books, but also those that can make the ideas in these books come alive through concrete action. The 2002 Publisher of the Year has been extraordinarily creative in finding ways to disseminate academic books and remarkably fast in making available research-based books that have something urgent to say to the Filipino people."

To all the finalists and winners, as well as to all writers, designers, and publishers of books published last year, congratulations!

By the way, the awarding ceremonies for the 2003 National Book Awards will be held earlier next year. If you have a 2003 book that you feel the members of the Manila Critics Circle might miss (because we read mostly books available at large bookstores), you should send at least one review copy to me at the Department of Filipino, De La Salle University, 2401 Taft Avenue, Malate, Manila.

For other inquiries or for other questions related to this column, you can email me at [email protected].

LANGUAGE MATTERS: Reader J. S. Ong of Pasig writes about the broken English of President Gloria Arroyo. His letter is excellent and deserves to be printed in full:

One immediate victim of President Arroyo’s election bid speech is the English language. I’m not referring to her use of English and Filipino within the same speech — as a Filipino politician, she’s expected to communicate that way. But since she also speaks for posterity, she should observe the niceties of grammar and idiom in whatever language she chooses.

Item: "By taking myself out of the political landscape, for a while our enemies halted ...." The phrase "by taking myself" refers to the noun that immediately follows. This happens to be "enemies" and not (as she intended) the pronoun "we" in the next clause, "we moved forward." The sentence is understandable, but imprecise.

Item: "And as we do, let us move on ... to flourish our future." Used as a verb, "flourish" is either transitive or intransitive. It is intransitive when it means "grow well," or "thrive" — and that is almost certainly the meaning she intended here. If so, it cannot take an object, as in "to flourish our future." As a transitive verb, "flourish" takes on a different meaning — it is to wave or brandish dramatically. You can brandish a weapon, but how does one brandish a future, when one hasn’t got it — it’s still some ways off?

Item: "I can no longer stave the dam of politics." "To stave" is "to break or smash a hole in." I daresay Mrs. Arroyo wasn’t trying to break or smash holes in any dams, least of all in Pampanga. What she probably had in mind was "to stave off" — a phrasal verb that means "to hold off or repel," as in "we hope to stave off disaster." So one might describe a dam as staving off the threat of flood, but how does one stave off a dam? A dam just sits there, minding its own business. Mrs. Arroyo and her speechwriter should leave it alone, instead of garbling idioms and mixing metaphors.