An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, with Related Texts

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Hackett Publishing, Jan 1, 2003 - History - 192 pages

Fifty years after the arrival of Columbus, at the height of Spain’s conquest of the West Indies, Spanish bishop and colonist Bartolomé de Las Casas dedicated his Brevísima Relación de la Destruición de las Indias to Philip II of Spain. An impassioned plea on behalf of the native peoples of the West Indies, the Brevísima Relación catalogues in horrific detail atrocities it attributes to the king’s colonists in the New World. The result is a withering indictment of the conquerors that has cast a 500-year shadow over the subsequent history of that world and the European colonization of it.

Andrew Hurley’s daring new translation dramatically foreshortens that five hundred years by reversing the usual priority of a translation; rather than bring the Brevísima Relación to the reader, it brings the reader to the Brevísima Relación--not as it is, but as it might have been, had it been originally written in English. The translator thus allows himself no words or devices unavailable in English by 1560, and in so doing reveals the prophetic voice, urgency and clarity of the work, qualities often obscured in modern translations. An Introduction by Franklin Knight, notes, a map, and a judicious set of Related Readings offer further aids to a fresh appreciation of this foundational historical and literary work of the New World and European engagement with it.
 

Contents

Acknowledgments
vii
A Note on the Text and the Translation
li
Some Earlier English Translations of Bartolomé de las Casas
lvii
On the Island Hispaniola
8
On the Two Islands of San Juan and Jamaica
17
On the Province of Nicaragua
25
On the Province and Kingdom of Guatimala
38
On the Kingdom of Yucatán
47
On the New Kingdom of Granada
78
Testament
86
New Laws of the Indies
93
A Treatise on the Just Causes for War against the Indians
103
From Hernán Cortés Cartas de relación
111
Table of Weights and Measures Used in the Text
121
Index
127
Copyright

On the Province of Santa Marta
54

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About the author (2003)

Franklin Knight is Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University, and the author of The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (Oxford) and Slave Societies of the Caribbean (Macmillan).

Andrew Hurley is Professor of English, University of Puerto Rico, and the award-winning translator of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction including the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (Viking) and several novels by Reinaldo Arenas.

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