This summer, I worked with Professor Paravisini-Gerbert and Professor Aronna on the first and second volumes of Historia General y Natural de las Indias (General and Natural History of the Indies) by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. This was an extremely exciting time to be working with The Oviedo Translation Project because I came in during the final editing and wrapping up stage(s) of pre-publication and publication of Volume I.

I began my summer editing the annotations of Volume I of the Oviedo project. I read all the footnotes in the 19 Books to ensure the new annotations were cited as English Edition [EE] and fixed grammar/typos to ensure that the footnotes read well. Additionally, I worked on other small tasks: fixing formatting, erasing class years from student translators’ names, and checking that certain dates were listed as BC and AD (in place of BCE and CE).

I was also tasked with combining all of the previous bibliographies into a final collective bibliography. Additionally, I searched Vassar’s database for any additional publications that had been missed in past years when researching Oviedo’s work and for any recent publications that could be added.

In addition to editing the bibliography, I helped fix and complete the Table of Contents. A table of contents had been started but didn’t include many of the later books, and there had been edits to the prefaces and chapter headings that had not been corrected in the contents. After corrections, I began the methodical job of copying over the book and chapter numbers along with their descriptions. Through this process, I edited any awkward phrasing and identified the discrepancies in spelling or references.

After editing, completing notes from the copyeditor, and finalizing the bibliography and table of contents, Volume I was officially sent to Brill Publishers! To have Volume I published, we needed to send publication contracts to all the student translators in the volume. While this initially seemed straightforward, getting in contact with all of the previous students ended up being one of the hardest tasks. I began by collecting the names of the student translators from the manuscript and the Oviedo Project’s website, then researching each former student: gathering personal, public, or work emails, LinkedIn contacts, or social media tags. Then Professor Paravisini-Gerbert and I reached out to the translators through email, LinkedIn, text, and social media so they could send us their contact information for the publishers. We ended up with a long list of contacts of 49 translators. Unfortunately, we were never able to contact one translator, so Professor Paravisini-Gerbert is re-translating their work.

In my last week and a half, I began work on Volume II. I identified words, places, and people mentioned in three books of the second Volume. I also created a spreadsheet to organize all of the words identified for annotation and began researching and writing the footnotes.

Professor Paravisini-Gerbert is an incredible force, and it has been a pleasure to work with her and Professor Aronna on a project that they are both passionate about and that they bring their heart and soul into. I would love to continue contributing to the Oviedo project in the future and see the progression of publications! Congratulations on the first publication!