LOLA BASYANG

Q.Was there a real Lola Basyang?

A.Yes. Gervacia Guzman de Zamora, a matriarch of the Zamora clan from Quiapo, Manila, was the model for Lola Basyang, the famous fictional storyteller created by playwright Severino Reyes. Reyes knew her as a doting grandmother who told stories to her grand children after supper almost everyday. He immotalized her in the magazine series Mga kwento ni Lola Basyang, which first came out in Liwayway on May 25, 1925. It became a popular radio series in the 1950's.

For the Record.. Such popular stories as "Aladdins's Lamp," "Sinbad the Sailor," and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" are from the Arabian Nights or the Thousand Nights and a Night, an imaginative collection of tales translated into English by British traveler and polygot Sir Richard F. Burton in1888. Researchers believe the original collector may have been a 15th- century Egyptian proffessional storyteller.

First of All. The book first appeared in China in the second millenium B.C., but it was only between the second and fourth centuries A.D. that it appeared in the West in the form we know.

WORD WATCH

LIterature (lit' re choor) : from Latin literatus meaning "having knowledge of letters."