FLORANTE AT LAURA

“Pag-ibig anaki’y aking nakilala,

‘di dapat palakihin ang bata sa saya;

at sa katuwaa’y kapag namihasa,

kung lumaki’y walang hihinting ginhawa.”

Florante at Laura holds the distinction of being the oldest Filipino literary piece that has not gone out of print since it was first published in 1838. The poem was written by Francisco Baltazar as he was serving time in a Manila prison around 1835.

 Florante is comprised of 399 monorhyming dodecasyllabic quatrains in deep, deep Tagalog and remains the scourge of many high school students. Yet so beloved is this poem that among the many published versions, one was done by Apolinario Mabini himself when he wrote down the entire poem from memory while in exile in Guam.

Sadly, there are no extant versions of the thousands of copies of Florante that were published during Spanish times, except for a single 1875 edition in the Newberry Library in Chicago.