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Translator's Preface ANTONELLO CERB! died on 26 July 1976, shortly after the publication of the Italian edition of this work. His disappearance robbed the field of intellectual history of one of its most outstanding practitioners, and the present translator of a much valued adviser, companion, and friend. In preparing the English translation of this his last work I was thus unable to enjoy the constant and close collaboration with the author that had aided me so much when working on the translation of his Dispute. I was however extremely fortunate in finding a most competent substitute in his son, Sandro, who carried out much painstaking research in various libraries on both sides of the Atlantic in response to my numerous queries regarding points of bibliographical or historical detail. The generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities also enabled me to consult Antonio Alatorre, of the Colegio de Mexico, the Spanish translator of Gerbi's work, and Daymond Turner, of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, the renowned Oviedo expert. The fourth member of the team whose joint experience and wisdom I unashamedly exploited was Jeremy Lawrance, of Magdalen College, Oxford, and the University of Manchester, who read the manuscript, checked my translations from Spanish and Latin, and made many useful suggestions concerning matters relating to the world of Renaissance Spain. I should like to take the opportunity of expressing my gratitude to this distinguished quadrumvirate, both for the warm welcome they accorded me whenever I visited them and for their unstinting help in professional matters. The Italian edition of this work gives all quotations in the original language. As these are numerous and often lengthy, and as the languages primarily concerned-Spanish and Latin-are less accessible to English-speaking readers than to their Italian counterparts, I have preferred to put all quotations into English. The translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. The reader wishing to consult the original xv xvi Preface language versions may of course refer either to the Italian or Spanish editions of this work, or to the primary sources named in each case. One of the most difficult problems facing the translator is the extent to which he may legitimately "improve on" the original. He is constantly tempted to second-guess the author, to emerge momentarily from behind the mask of enforced anonymity and put in his own two pennyworth , to set the record straight. I have manfully resisted that temptation , even, for instance, when Gerbi takes Brogan's word for it that the English are now far too polite to refer to their nearest continental neighbors as "frogs." The work now submitted to the reader is therefore a straightforward translation of the highly innovative study presented to the Italian-speaking public in 1975, rather than an annotated or updated edition incorporating subsequent research on the same subject. When the time is ripe for this latter undertaking we may perhaps hope to see a new edition of the Natura from the same hand that recently produced the superb new Italian edition of the Dispute of the New World, Sandro Gerbi. Such minor modifications as I have made are therefore purely editorial: the addition of a slightly fuller bibliographical reference or the correction of some figure or the spelling of some name that may have gone astray. Attention is not of course drawn to these admendments in the text, as such interpolations could be distracting to the reader. In this connection I should however mention that I have inserted references to the works of Thomas D. Goodrich, Murdo J. MacLeod, P. Revelli, and William M. Sherman, as notes found among Gerbi's papers after his death showed that he planned to mention these authors in any future edition of the Natura. The severest test of the translator's vow of anonymity arose, curiously enough, in connection with Oviedo's own foray into that same field, his translation of a work of Italian devotional literature. Here Gerbi's reference (chap. XV, sec. 6, end) to "an extremely rare, indeed unfindable" work, about which "nothing can be said with certainty until the Italian text has been compared with the supposed Spanish translation," proved altogether too much of a challenge. A visit to the British Museum, together with information supplied by Antonio Alatorre and Sandro Gerbi, revealed the actual situation to be as follows. Oviedo's source was not in fact Fra Cherubino da Siena, as Gerbi (and Daymond Turner) conjectured, but one "Pietro da Lucca," in...

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