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 translator and publisher.
During his voyage Malaspina wrote a report for the Spanish Crown on the political and economic state of the Spanish colonies he visited. His conclusion that restraint of trade set them at odds with the home country was accurate but unwelcome, and led eventually to his imprisonment on a charge of sedition. The surviving first half has been translated by John Black and María Soto de Podriske for publication on the Centre's website.
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 by Cristina Casanova and Dario Manfredi. While Manfredi pursues publication of an Italian version, an English translation has been completed by Oscar Clemotte and John Black at this Centre, and published by the Edwin Mellen Press in facing-page bilingual format, with historical and philosophical analyses. The essay itself is a contribution to the Enlightenment debate about whether beauty exists independently of the opinions of human beings.
Malaspina's first published work, a textbook in Latin exploring the most general (borderline metaphysical) aspects of Newtonian mechanics, in the form of a description of how these are taught at the Clementine College, which Malaspina attended. The book was published in 1772, when he was seventeen years old.
This work, originally written in Italian, then translated and published in Spanish in the volume La América Imposible (ed. Blanca Saíz, Madrid, Compañía Literaria, 1994) is an extremely accessible introduction to the life and works of Malaspina. Rights to translate the biography from Spanish into English having been secured through its author Dario Manfredi (of the Centro di Studi Malaspiniani in Mulazzo, Italy), Teresa and Donald Kirschner completed the translation while Dario updated the work in light of recent scholarship. The manuscript was edited by John Black and others, and published on the AMRC website.
The AMRC website itself is being developed and maintained by John Black. Its purposes include the following:
1) to act as a focus in the English-speaking world for both academic research
into and general interest in the life and works of Alexandro Malaspina, as
well as a broad range of related topics;
2) to present in web-accessible form both primary documents and secondary
analysis relating to these topics;
3) to promote the activities of the AMRC.
Source documents and research analyses are posted on the Research Page. This resource is expanding quickly as a result of the collaboration of Dario Manfredi at the Centro di Studi Malaspiniani in Mulazzo, Italy, and many other scholars worldwide. The current focus of work at the AMRC itself is on the translation into English of Malaspina's letters and contemporary newspaper articles dealing with his expedition. Student researchers María Soto de Podriske and Lorill Ireland are close to the completion of this phase. Other researchers are encouraged to submit their work for consideration: please e-mail John Black if you have anything to offer. We regret that only material in electronic form can be accepted at this point in time.
The website also houses the Centre's Newsletter Archive and reproduces the newsletter, formerly edited by Dario Manfredi, of the Centro di Studi Malaspiniani (Mulazzo), in both the original Italian and an English translation.
At the end of 2005 the website underwent significant technical reconstruction implemented by then student assistant Josh Bachynski.