Project Overview

This summer, I worked as the Ford Scholar under Professor Paravisini-Gebert and Professor Aronna for Vassar’s Oviedo Project. In total, this project aims to translate all four volumes of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s 16th-century Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas – y tierra firme del mar océano into English for the first time. By doing so, we seek to make this source more accessible for research, as it contains pivotal information on the colonization of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Latin America.

The work is also notable for being a translation largely undertaken by undergraduates. As a class during the academic year, the Oviedo Project guides Vassar students through the independent translation of one to two chapters. My job for the summer was to help prepare these students’ translations of Volumes I and II for publication.

Annotations

For the first half of the summer, I worked primarily on annotating Volume II. The annotations will help current students and researchers better understand the text by explaining terminology, names, and places that would have been known to a 16th-century audience.

As part of this research, I was also in communication with several archives, including some in Spain, and heavily utilized the Vassar Library collection. 

Index

The second half of the summer took an unexpected turn. Volume I, currently in the works for publication, ended up exceeding the 1150-page limit that the publisher could print. So, the publisher reformatted it to fit within this boundary. However, this pagination issue meant that all the entries in the book’s 52-page index were suddenly incorrect. Given the purpose of this translation for helping in research, an accurate index is vital. Therefore, I spent the later half of the summer rewriting the index in Volume I, as well as continuing to annotate Volume II.