The publication of this collection of shorter works by the Spanish historian, Ramón Iglesia, is a timely reminder to Latin American specialists that the writing of critical essays seems to be a lost art these days. All too often, the short piece is a snippet from a young scholar’s dissertation. And the more mature scholar is too busy writing books—for yet one more promotion—to devote his time to an article or to an extended critical review.
Ramón Iglesia was not a dilettante historian—his work was always thoroughly grounded on the hard facts of the past. But he preferred to write, and always with grace and good judgment, about the facts of history, rather than simply to list them in some sort of chronological order. His essay on Hernán Cortés is perhaps the best short account of the Conqueror’s life in any language. He uses Cortés’ famous letters to good effect, extracting from them (in Cortés’ own words) the essence of the man. Iglesia is equally successful with Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, and Christopher Columbus.
It seems hardly possible that more than two decades have passed since Iglesia’s untimely death in 1948. And it is perhaps pointless to speculate what works he might have written had he lived a few more years. We do know that he was a great teacher and that he inspired fledgling historians at El Colegio de México in the 1940s. Today’s new generation of historians, still in or just out of graduate school, could do worse than to turn to Ramón Iglesia’s scintillating essays, for, we do not, alas, have his peer among us today.
Lesley Byrd Simpson is responsible for translating and editing Iglesia’s essays. (Certainly Simpson’s retirement from active teaching has not slowed his scholarly productivity.) Simpson acknowledges in his preface his debt to the Spaniard, whom he met in Mexico as a recent refugee from the Franco dictatorship. The American writes: “He and I soon discovered a common ground of interest in our views of historiography, and our acquaintance ripened into a lasting friendship. We became so close indeed, and our thoughts harmonized so exactly, that even today I do not know when or how his thought became mine, or mine his” (p. vii).
Simpson’s translations reflect the elegance of Iglesia’s original Spanish. A version of the essays, “Two Studies on Bernal Díaz,” appeared in HAHR, November 1940, 517-550. The present translation, while somewhat freer, is far superior in its literary tone. The editor also includes several book reviews written by Iglesia in the 1930s and 1940s, notably of Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Salvador Madariaga’s Hernán Cortés. Altogether another worthwhile production of the University of California Press.
