GUAGUA, Pampanga – Exactly 56 years after his death, great Kapampangan poet, academic, journalist, and politician Amado Magcalas Yuzon received his proper recognition on Jan. 17 with the unveiling of his monument and shrine at the Maquiapo Elementary School here.
“To inspire the youth,” Mayor Anthony Joseph “Ton” Torres said during the rites honoring Pampanga’s first crowned poet laureate and first “Ari ning Parnaso,” where a multi-generation of poets laureate inspired by Yuzon, notably Niño Jomar Chipe, Francisco Guinto, Sergio Gramonte Calayag, and Adrian Magcalas paid homage.
A Holy Mass officiated by San Fernando Archbishop Emeritus Paciano B. Aniceto preceded the reinterment of Yuzon’s remains and unveiling of his monument. precis on Yuzon by Center for Kapampangan Studies director Robby Tantingco for the occasion, renders more than a sketch of the poet-politician, thus:
“Yuzon is Pampanga’s first crowned poet laureate, first Ari ning Parnaso (king of poets), first president of the United Poets Laureate International (which he founded in 1963) and nominee to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.
He translated into Kapampangan many world classics by such masters as Omar Khayyam, Sophocles, Euripides, Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare.
Yuzon’s handwritten translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, done in Hongkong in 1938, is among the literary pieces currently on exhibit at the HAU Center for Kapampangan Studies. Another literary treasure at HAU-CKS is Yuzon’s 1931 crissotan (debate in verse) “Guintu laban Bacal” (Gold versus Iron), which was used in the award-winning Kapampangan film Ari: My Life with a King starring poet laureate Francisco Guinto and Coco Martin’s brother Ronwaldo Martin.
Yuzon, an eloquent speaker, won as congressman in 1946 (representing Pampanga’s 1st District).
He ran for reelection in 1949 against the rising political star, Lubao’s Diosdado Macapagal, who was also a poet like him. Thus, when they squared off during a public debate on stage, they behaved like true gentlemen and debated in verse—something that never happened before or since in Philippine politics, where rivals throw mud, rocks, arrows, knives, kitchen sink and the whole kitchen itself at one another during campaigning! (We have no records on who won the extraordinary political crissotan in 1949, but Macapagal did defeat Yuzon in that congressional election and eventually went on to become the President of the Philippines in 1961.)
By the way, Yuzon got entangled into the family tree of the heroic Aquino clan of Tarlac when he ran away with Fortunata, daughter of Gen. Servillano Aquino (grandfather of martyred hero Ninoy Aquino and great-grandfather of President Noynoy Aquino) and second wife Petronila Estrada nee Quiambao (sister of Servillano’s first wife Guadalupe) whose roots were in Macabebe. But that’s another long story to tell.”
That last paragraph in Tantingco’s brief explained the presence of former Sen. Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV during the unveiling of Yuzon’s monument. Photos: Sta Maria Archive Minalin
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