Noli Me Tangere Full Book English Version Pdf Free Download

"I want to read the best English translation of Noli Me Tangere!"

So you want to read the national novel of the Philippines, often called The Noli, and you don't read Spanish.

No problem. The work is more often read in English than in the original Spanish.

There are four common, complete English versions of José Pacienza Mercado y Rizal's 1887 satirical, melodramatic political novel, Noli Me Tángere available from multiple sources. The novel has also been abridged, adapted, bowdlerized, and translated with several different titles, so there's definitely some potential for confusion. Keep reading to learn how to choose an edition that's right for you.

If you're Filipino/a, you're at least somewhat familiar with Noli Me Tangere because of the 1956 law mandating the study of Rizal's works. You will have absorbed some information about the plot and characters of Noli Me Tangere, or possibly read the novel in its entirety, but you may not have had a choice about which version to read. If you thought it was boring, it's well worth giving the novel another try.

From educational publisher Vibal:

With its scathing and humorous attacks on tyranny, hypocrisy and false religion, and its pioneering call to individual virtue and national unity, Noli Me Tangere transcends its political agenda to become a true work of art, thus securing its rightful place in the pantheon of great world literature. It remains as fresh, vivid, moving, and subversive as on the day it was first published.

Noli Me Tangere: Translation History

There are four major, complete English translations of Noli Me Tangere, shown below in chronological order.

1912: The Social Cancer , translated by Charles Derbyshire (American)

1961: The Lost Eden (Noli Me Tángere), translated by Leon M. Guerrero (Filipino)

1996: Noli Me Tángere: A Novel , translated by María Soledad Lacson-Locsin (Filipina)

2006: Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not), translated by Harold Augenbraum (American)

The Derbyshire translation lacks one chapter, which was called "Elias and Salome" and followed chapter 24. It was deleted from the draft by the author before the book's initial publication. Since it was deleted for financial reasons and not literary ones, the chapter is restored in most editions.

In "The Afterlives of the Noli me t ángere" in Philippine Studies vol. 59 no. 4 (2011): 495–527, Anna Melinda Testa-de Ocampo gives a more detailed translation history, listing the following additional editions.

• 1933: Feliciano Basa and Francisco Benitez, translation with explanatory notes, assisted by Eduardo Montenegro and C. M. Mellen, illus. Juan Luna and Fernando Amorsolo, with an introduction by Manuel L. Quezon. School edition. Manila: Oriental Commercial Co. Inc., 632 pp.
• 1956: Jorge Bocobo, translation from the original Spanish. Quezon City: R. Martinez and Sons. 488 pp.
• 1957: Camilo Osias, translation from the Spanish of Dr. Jose Rizal, trans. Camilo Osias. [Manila]: Asian Foundation for Cultural Advancement. 568 pp. 24 cm.
• 1967: Priscilla Valencia, illus. Adrian Amorsolo. Manila: Phil-Asian Book Co. 404 pp.
• 1989: Jovita Ventura Castro, translation sponsored by the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information. Manila: Nalandangan Inc. 388 pp.

Below are details about each of the four major English translations. After that, I'll share some information on some adaptations, including abridgments, comics, and a graphic novel.

"What is the English meaning of 'Noli Me Tangere'? Why was this Latin phrase chosen as the title?"

"Noli me tangere" can be translated as "touch me not". In other words, the meaning of "noli me tangere" in English is "don't touch me".

The phrase could have been meant to refer to a flower or a type of cancer, but Rizal said it was a quote from the Bible.

This article in the Manila Times points out that Rizal said that the quote was from the Gospel of Luke when it is actually from the Gospel of John, and elaborates on the connection to cancer.

The author's dedication to his fatherland is reproduced in the Derbyshire translation, which is titledThe Social Cancer. The dedication draws a comparison between the ills of society and the ills of a human body suffering from a particularly painful form of cancer:

Recorded in the history of human sufferings is a cancer of so malignant a character that the least touch irritates it and awakens in it the sharpest pains. Thus, how many times… hath thy dear image presented itself showing a social cancer like to that other!

From Charles Derbyshire's introduction:

Noli Me Tangere ("Touch Me Not") at the time the work was written had a peculiar fitness as a title. Not only was there an apt suggestion of a comparison with the common flower of that name, but the term is also applied in pathology to a malignant cancer which affects every bone and tissue in the body, and that this latter was in the author's mind would appear from the dedication and from the summing-up of the Philippine situation in the final conversation between Ibarra and Elias. But in a letter written to a friend in Paris at the time, the author himself says that it was taken from the Gospel scene where the risen Savior appears to the Magdalene, to whom He addresses these words, a scene that has been the subject of several notable paintings.

In this connection it is interesting to note what he himself thought of the work, and his frank statement of what he had tried to accomplish, made just as he was publishing it: "Noli Me Tangere, an expression taken from the Gospel of St. Luke, means touch me not. The book contains things of which no one up to the present time has spoken, for they are so sensitive that they have never suffered themselves to be touched by any one whomsoever."

fresco by Fra Angelico from Museum of San Marco, Florence, Italy

Source: https://welovetranslations.com/2021/01/18/whats-the-best-english-translation-of-noli-me-tangere/

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