1 Revolutions entwined "Wilhelm Tell" in Tagalog. Essay. (Version: March 28, 2015. This is still a draft, please don't pass it on just yet. It is supposed to come out as one of two introductions to a Philippine facsimile edition of Rizal's Guillermo Tell, by late 2015 or 2016, edited by Ramon Guillermo) Introduction When José Rizal translated Friedrich Schiller's «Wilhelm Tell» in 1886, he was forced to take some decisions: Should he keep the German names and titles? Or would Spanish names make the play more accessible to an audience in Kalamba, Laguna? What should he do about those geographic features that hadn't been named in Tagalog: the glacier and the avalanche, hail, snow, the elder bush, the cuckoo, and that monster of a lake's name «Vierwaldstättersee»? As in any translation, there is no simple transfer of words and expressions from one language to another; there has to be a translation from one grammar and its underlying assumptions into another one. Sometimes, there needs to be a translation of context. In the case of Rizal's «Guillermo Tell», different contexts seem to be interlinked. Reading this text as a Swiss writer, a native German speaker who studied at the University of the Philippines, I find at least five revolutions overlapping in the text: There is that uprising of three mountain provinces of Switzerland against Austrian officials in the mythological year of 1291, there is the French revolution of 1789 to 1799, the foundation of modern Switzerland in 1848, republican movements in Spain and the Philippine colony, culminating in the six years of turmoil and revolution from 1868 to 1874; and there is the Philippine revolution against Spain, starting in 1896, ten years after Rizal translated this piece. When Friedrich Schiller wrote «Wilhelm Tell», he had never been to Switzerland. That small country in the middle of Europe was not on his mind. It was the year of 1804 and Schiller grappled with the violence and the war coming out of the French revolution – a revolution he had welcomed when it began 1 . Was the killing of an official, a bailiff or a king ever legitimate? Or would it always unleash forces of chaos submerging any human or natural order? Schiller didn't have clear-cut answers to these questions, so he forged a drama out of them. Setting the action amongst medieval mountain folks – half-savages in the eyes of cultured Weimar –, helped him to avoid straight allusions to the political realities of his time 1 Peter von Matt (2012).