Students of colonial Colombia will welcome Professor William C. Atkinson of Glasgow University’s edited translation of Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero or La conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada. . . This best-loved of Colombian colonial chronicles—perhaps the first penned by a native Bogotano—remained unprinted though much read in various manuscript copies until 1859, when the Liberal geographer, politician, and writer Felipe Pérez (1836-1891) brought out the first printed version in Bogotá. Since then, four other editions have seen publication, all in Bogotá: 1884, 1935, 1942, and 1955.
The Nuevo Reino as Rodríguez Freile (1566-ca. 1640) knew it was composed of what are now the Departments of Cundinamarca and Boyacá. This area, and mainly Bogotá and Tunja, the major cities, provide the scene for his narrative. The period covered ranges from the last years of Muisca times (ca. 1536) to 1636, deep in Hapsburg colonial days. A crónica in the truest sense, the Carnero records not only the main theme of the declining Indian princelings, Guatavitá and Bogotá, the coming of the learned conqueror Gonzalo Ximénez de Quesada and the genesis of Castilian rule, but also the private lives of dozens of lesser colonial characters: gobernadores, oidores, encomenderos, merchants, soldiers, their wives, lovers, servants, wiles, and woes. Life in the thinly Europeanized colony, its prideful violence, lust, and greed has been set down by the wry Rodríguez Freile in a masterful weave, sometimes suggestive of La Celestina, Guzmán de Alfarache, and not a little of Il decamarone.
Not only does Professor Atkinson manage to render a difficult and frequently wordy and repetitious original into a readable text, but he is also to be commended for doing this so well as to conserve successfully much of the piquant flavor and wit of its author. We must thank the editor-translator, too, for making better known and more accessible an important source of early colonial social history.
An exquisite gold-stamped binding, handsome maps on the end-papers, good introduction, seven tasteful engravings, and the index further complement this finely prepared translation.
