Selection of Writings of Alexander von Humboldt in Spanish
Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most fascinating scientists of the nineteenth century. He conducted detailed, lengthy explorations in today’s Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Panamá, Ecuador and Perú in the Americas, as well as in Russia, and wrote extensively based on these voyages. His interests were astonishingly wide, including biology, geology, astronomy and magnetism. In fact, it was Humboldt who convinced Karl Gauss to perform research in magnetism.
I have previously written about Humboldt in the following previous posts:
Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos, New Translation into Spanish
The New Spanish-language Version of Humboldt's Cosmos Is Now Complete
At the Bogotá International Book Fair, I picked up Escritos 1789-18591, a two-volume collection of Humboldt’s writings, translated into Spanish and published by Herder in Mexico City in 2019 and 2021.
Below is my adaptation of a Deepl translation of the Spanish-language description from https://herder.com.mx/es/libros-books/escritos-1789-1859-volumenes-i-y-ii/alexander-von-humboldt/herder-mexico
According to the most recent state of research, between 1789 and 1859, between 750 and a thousand different texts appeared during Alexander von Humboldt’s lifetime, ‘non-autonomous’ publications, not appearing in book form, but in magazines and newspapers or in books by other authors or compilers — a corpus as large as it is varied, previously available, if at all, in a fragmentary form and only partially explored. These shorter writings, essays and articles form in a sense Humboldt's other Cosmos; in them the author does not describe the whole world in a book, but the whole world in a thousand writings.
This selection presents one hundred texts in Spanish translation only as a foretaste of that whole corpus that is yet to be discovered. Both volumes provide a much more complete picture of Humboldt as a writer.
A review (in Spanish) of the first volume was written by translator Mario Domínguez Parra: https://logotejnikimetafrasi.wordpress.com/2019/07/23/alexander-von-humboldt-escritos-volumen-i
The translations are a selection from the ten-volume Sämtliche Schriften2 [Complete Writings] of Alexander von Humboldt, edited by Oliver Lubrich and Thomas Nehrlich, published in 2019 in honour of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Humboldt.
Below is a Deepl translation of the German-language description from https://www.dtv.de/buch/saemtliche-schriften-studienausgabe-59088
Alexander von Humboldt, who came from a noble Prussian family, was an explorer, natural scientist, homme de lettres, acquainted with all the great poets and thinkers and the most international publicist of his time. In addition to numerous books, he published around 1,000 articles and essays. These writings appeared in 15 languages in 1,240 international newspapers and journals on five continents — and were never published as a collection after his death and most of them were never reprinted individually.
The ‘Berner Ausgabe Sämtlicher Schriften’, edited by a team led by the internationally renowned Humboldt experts Oliver Lubrich and Thomas Nehrlich, brings this enormous treasure to light.
In addition to his research findings, Humboldt's writings contain a wealth of information about his life. His biography will have to be rewritten on this basis. Above all, however, his writings are an invitation to travel — and to read.
Humboldt’s original-language publications (in German, French, English, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, …) can all be found online at the University of Bern website https://humboldt.unibe.ch/text
There is a YouTube video (in German) for the launch of the digital edition:
Alexander von Humboldt. Escritos 1789-1859, editados por primera vez. Volúmenes I y II. Edición de Oliver Lubrich y Thomas Nehrlich. Traducción de José Aníbal Campos, Laura Cecilia Nicolás y Orestes Sandoval. Ciudad de México: Editorial Herder, 2019, 2021.
Alexander von Humboldt. Sämtliche Schriften. Herausgeber Oliver Lubrich und Thomas Nehrlich. München: dtv Verlagsgesellschaft, 2019.