Chronicle
Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí
Not translated into English
Synopsis
A chronicle of Potosí, a city built on the richest silver mine in the world and then the most populous in the New World, up to 1736. Arzáns recounts its wealth, the size of its population and its civil wars, such as that between the Vicuñas and the Basques, the flood of 1626 and the coinage fraud of 1650; he piles up festivals, bullfights, portents and memorable "casos", and denounces the cruelty of the authorities and the suffering of the Indians.
Context
Begun early in the eighteenth century and extended by eight chapters by the author's son, the chronicle remained in manuscript: one copy entered the library of the King of Spain, another, bought in Paris in 1905 by George Earl Church, went to Brown University. After fragments, including fifty chapters published in Buenos Aires in 1943, Lewis Hanke and Gunnar Mendoza produced the first complete edition in 1965, in three volumes. A selection of tales appeared in English in 1975 under the title Tales of Potosí; the work has not been translated into French.
Who it is for
To plunge into the daily life of a fabulous mining city, between splendour and poverty, in the days of the Spanish empire.
Prizes and reception
According to Blanca Wiethüchter, almost all critics regard this chronicle as the first work of Bolivian literature.