edited by John Cummins
The explorer's shipboard journal details his first voyage to the New World and his fateful encounter with the natives. It exists today only in a later manuscript copy by Bartolome de Las Casas, who paraphrased extensively in the third person. By restructuring this version and supplementing it with other sources, Cummins (Spanish, Univ. of Aberdeen) claims to have restored the original in a nonliteral translation that "remodels" Columbus's cumbersome Spanish. The resulting lively and highly readable narrative will have historians arguing about the authenticity of its voice. The transcription and literal translation contained in The "Diario" of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America (Univ. of Oklahoma Pr., 1989) remains the standard scholarly English-language edition, but general readers will enjoy Cummins's work.
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