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Updated January, 2025
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We will soon end our six and a half year sojourn in Japan, returning to an as-yet-undisclosed location in the USA. After nearly eighteen years abroad we will begin a domestic adventure.
Work
I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a translation, over a decade marinating, of the first letters of Bartolomé de las Casas. Thanks to my colleague David Orique for shepherding this project to completion. Only one of the lot has ever been published before in English, and they contain marrow of the later friar’s lifelong critique of Spanish colonialism, and proposals for peaceful evangelization. This should come out sometime in 2025 with Catholic University of America Press.
David and I are also co-editing a volume of collected essays on Bartolomé de las Casas, Transatlantic Reformer. This should be completed later this year, to be published by Brill sometime in late 2025 or early 2026.
Inspired by the above, I’ve also begun translating Las Casas’s most famous work, the Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias. There are already two excellent recent renditions by Nigel Griffin (1992) and Andrew Hurley (2003), so why another? Well when I’m editing colleagues’ articles, I find I always want to tweak something. Griffin’s work is particularly clear and evocative; Hurley’s is more straightforward and deliberately archaic. They’re both missing—and this is a fault of the Spanish editions as well—sufficient engagement with the immediate underlying Latin, nuances of which I’m trying to lift up. Also, both lie firmly behind copyright, so there’s no quick place to send scholars and teachers for a responsible, up-to-date translation. So, I’m giving it a go.
I’m hoping for this to become the inaugural publication of the Biblioteca Lascasiana, which I am in the process of founding and forming. This emerged as a collaboration with Jeffrey Witt, who has done amazing with with critical digital editions at scta.org and Lombard Press. We have begun working on an edition of Las Casas’s most famous Latin work the Apologia, with editions of De Thesauris, De Unico Vocationis Modo, and De Regia Potestate. Our ambitious goal is to publish similar editions (and translations) of Las Casas’s major Spanish works as well, particularly the Historia de las Indias and the Apologética Historia.
Play
All the above has nudged me back into the inner workings of the web, where I had some experience hand-coding sites over twenty years ago. I’ve always dabbled on the edges of development—writing my doctoral thesis in LaTeX, using Emacs on a discarded PC running Gentoo Linux, an oddity for historians of Christian doctrine. A lot as changed since those early days. But inspired by Derek Sivers and his encouragement toward tech-independence, I’m back on the bandwagon. This site is written in vanilla html/css using Vim.
I’m particular in debt to the small web, and its champions. Someday I’ll probably migrate to a static site generator (11ty is the top candidate at the moment), but for the now I’m seeing what can do with the very basics. Before that however, I really hope to implement some of the Tufte styles. Thanks to Dave for pointers. But one small thing at a time.
Reading is constant, as usual. The latest finds:
- Simon Schama’s Citizens renders the French Revolution darkly entertaining. One of the best pieces of historical writing ever. Up there with Wedgewood’s Thirty Years’s War, and Simpson’s Many Mexicos.
- Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. I’d only ever seen the 1997 production (highly recommended), which is incredibly faithful and marvelously acted. Fielding’s original absolutely delightful, and full of the most incredible wit and insight.
We’re making the best of our last months in Japan, travelling extensively. You’ll find me running up Mt. Takao, listening to The Rest is History, and learning to manage the various systems it takes to live a simple life.