Abstract
Images and texts about the archive in the expansion of Europe into the New World are traces of the great changes that occurred in 1492 and the decades that followed. The Americas were an unexpected place for Europeans bent on expanding south and east or west in search of Asia. Although this expansion first affected Portugal and Spain, it came to bear on other European states. The devastating effects on Native peoples is also something that Bartolomé de Las Casas captured in his work.1 The encounter texts he produced and the translations of his work and other intertextual productions suggest the complexity of representing the New World. This chapter is designed to show literature, theory, and history in action, that is, how scholarship informs teaching.
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Notes
See, for instance, Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). This last book is designed largely for students.
A good resource for all teachers of Las Casas and other writers representing the New World is European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1776, ed. John Alden, vols. 1–5 (New York: Readex, 1980–97).
See also Jonathan Hart, Representing the New World: English and French Uses of the Example of Spain (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Saint-Lu identifies the 1594 Lyons edition, noting that it included the canceled title page of the 1582 edition and was based on the 1579 Antwerp translation (André Saint-Lu, Las Casas indigeniste: Études sur la vie et l’œuvre du défenseur des Indiens (Paris: L’Harmatten, 1982), 164). All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffith, intro. Anthony Pagden (New York: Penguin, 1992), 96.
See, for instance, book 1, chapter 17 of the edition of 1618 in the accessible Grant translation of Marc Lescarbot, The History of France, trans. W. L. Grant, 3 vols. (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1907–14), 1: 125–30. Lescarbot uses a rhetorical flourish to highlight not simply the vast numbers of dead but also the number of incidents of cruelty in Las Casas’s text: “This good bishop, unable to endure all these cruelties and a hundred thousand others, made remonstrances and complaints thereon to the King of Spain.” Moreover, Lescarbot claims, “what I have said is a small parcel of the contents of the book of this author,” whom, he emphasizes, the Spaniards themselves cite (1: 30).
André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France antarctique (Paris: Chex les héritiers de Maurice de la Porte, 1558), 16–24.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, Tyrannies et cruautez des Espagnols commises es Indes Occidentales qu’on dit le Nouveau Monde, trans. Jacques de Miggrode (Rouen, 1642),Ã2r.
Chauveton’s 1579 volume also included Nicolas Le Challeux’s Discours … de la Floride (first published in Dieppe in 1566), an account of the Spanish massacre of the French in Florida. The 1565 massacre was one of the events that turned the rhetoric of the Huguenots against Spain.
André Thevet, André Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View, ed. Roger Schlesinger and Arthur Stabler (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 161.
Richard Hakluyt, A Particular Discourse (1584), ed. David B. Quinn and Alison Quinn (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), 111; see also the Quinns’ “Commentary” in Hakluyt’s book, 186–87.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, Tears of the Indians, trans. John Phillips (London: Nath, Brook, 1656), A4v–A6r.
Edward Leigh’s Latin Treatise of Religion and Learning, and of Religious and Learned Men (London: A. M[iller] for C. Admas, 1656) relayed Las Casas’s account of the destruction of the Indies, and in 1658, the king of Spain’s cabinet discussed the cruelties of the Spaniards in America (The King of Spain’s Cabinet Divulged; or, A Discovery of the Prevarications of the Spaniard’s [London: J. H. for J. S., 1658]).
Johannes Gysius, Oorsprong en voortgang der Nederlandtschen becerten [Leyden, 1616] and his Tweede deel van de spieghel der Spaenishe tyrannye (Amsterdam: J. E. Cloppenburg, 1620).
Bartolomé de Las Casas, La decouverte des Indes Occidentales, par les Espagnols, trans. J. B. M. Morvan de Bellegarde (Paris: André Pralard, 1697).
Las Casas, La decouverte des Indes Occidentales, parles Espagnols, trans. J. B. M. Morvan de Bellegarde (Paris: André Pralard, 1697). Bellegarde’s version was reprinted with Relation curieuse des voyages du Sieur de Montauban in Amsterdam in 1698. It was also translated as A Relation of the First Voyages and Discoveries Made By Spaniards in America (London: D. Brown and A. Bell, 1699). Saint-Lu, Las Casas indigeniste 168–69.
A. F. Allison, English Translations from the Spanish and Portuguese to the year 1700: An Annotated Catalogue of the Extant Printed Adaptations, Excluding Dramatic Adaptations (London: Dawson of Pall Mall, 1974), 42.
Colin Steele, English Interpreters of the Iberian New World from Purchas to Stevens: A Bibliographical Study, 1603–1726 (Oxford: Dolphin, 1975), 107–08, 175–76.
Peter Burke, Montaigne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 46.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne (Paris, 1588), rpt. as Les Essais de Montaigne, 3 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1906–31), 3: 399. All citations from the Essais are from the 1588 edition, unless otherwise indicated.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest. ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1958).
Kermode, The Tempest, 145–47n62; Carl Orwin Sauer, Sixteenth-Century North America: The Land and the People as Seen by the Europeans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 13, 15.
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© 2011 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2011). Translating Las Casas. In: Literature, Theory, History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339583_10
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