While Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) written by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry in 1943 now has over 300 translations in different languages worldwide and is now considered the world’s most translated book (not counting religious works), there have been surprisingly only two translations of his book in the Philippines (Filipino and Bicol). El Diutay Principe is only the third edition featuring a Philippine language. The Little Prince is a classic French novella about a pilot who gets stranded in the desert after a plane crash and encounters a little fellow who asks him to draw a sheep for him. Through the course of their meeting, the pilot rediscovers the true meaning of life and what people should value the most. When I came across the book in 2013, I found that I could relate very well to the negative image given to “growing up” in the book. When the idea to translate the book into my mother tongue was presented to me, I didn’t think twice. I thought, ‘a lot of people my ...
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Depending on where you live in the Philippines or the family that you were born into, this practice may have different applications or perhaps it isn't practiced at all.
When I stayed over a friend's house in Bataan for Christmas twelve years ago, we attended a midnight mass and I was very surprised when I saw people falling in line to take the priest's hand. They also practiced this at home with their parents and visitors were expected to do it as well. It felt very strange to take the hand of my friend's father whom I have only met a few days ago and place it on my forehead.
My friend in Tarlac told me that this was not practiced at all among Ilocanos. She said that this was a Tagalog tradition.
I have always associated this practice as a manner of greeting and showing respect to aunts and uncles who lived far away. For some reason, my parents never asked me to do this with my paternal grandmother and aunt and uncles who lived next door. Normally, we kiss them as a form of greeting.
In Tagalog, this is called 'pagmamano'. Even though, we have been taught in school that this was a tradition coming from the Spanish, I never connected the word 'magmano' to the word 'mano' in Spanish which means 'hand'. I mean obviously, this is the reason why we call this 'magmano'.
But based on what I can recall when I was a child, we called this 'besa mano' in Zamboanga city. This literally means 'to kiss a hand'. It makes sense because if I remember correctly, I read somewhere that this evolved from the practice of kissing hands. But as far as I know, nobody kisses hands anymore. Today, we take the other person's hand and place it on our foreheads. Although, some online dictionaries still define 'pagmamano' as kissing the hand of an elderly relative.
As a grown up, I no longer do this with any relative because I feel like I have outgrown it. In social media, there are discussions about how it is a dying tradition.
To be honest, I hated doing it as a kid. I remember my father getting mad at me whenever I refused to do it. I couldn't understand why but I think now I know why I disliked this practice so much.
This practice is akin to bowing before a king or kissing the ring of a pope, a display of complete submission to authority.
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