During his incarceration in the fortress of San Antón in La Coruña, Malaspina wrote several essays on various subjects. The manuscript of one of these works, held at the Centro di Studi Malaspiniani in Mulazzo, Italy, has been converted into digital text and published in both the original Spanish and an Italian translation by Dario Manfredi. Erik Liddell, of the Foreign Languages and Humanities Department at Eastern Kentucky University and an Associated Research Scholar at AMRC, has produced an English translation with an introduction. This was published in Metamorphoses: a journal of literary translation in Spring 2013, and is reproduced here by kind permission of the author and publisher.