austraLasia #3253
Melbourne: 4 August 2013 --A new treasure-trove of Don Bosco's texts in English is now available on SDL - and more will be added in coming weeks, so keep tuned!
With the final year of preparation for Don Bosco's birth bicentenary just a few months off - and the focus shifting to Don Bosco's spirituality - there will be a much more intense interest in a wide range of his own writings. But the situation for English-speaking readers up until now has been difficult, since but a few of these texts, relatively speaking, are in the public domain in English.
Fr Aldo Giraudo has put together a fine 'new' collection of Don Bosco's writings which evidence his spirituality and particularly his many efforts to pass that spirituality on via sermons, conferences, 'good nights', correspondence, rules and regulations, circulars, books, and dreams. this complete collection with his own introduction and comments is now in the hands of the printer in Salesian India and will be made available in due course.
But the texts - Don Bosco's texts - are all in the public domain in Italian and should be likewise available in English! So in fact they are now available in SDL. Many, in fact the majority, have not been available either in part or in full previously; thier availability now represents an important step forward for the English reader.
What kind of texts are we talking about? There are 77 of them in all, and they cover the following range of genres:
- Don Bosco's correspondence with Salesians and Salesian Sisters (24)
- Don Bosco's correspondence with young people (8)
- Dreams told especially for the boys at the Oratory (3)
- Dreams told especially to Salesians (2 - the Lanzo dream or the Salesian Garden, and the 10 Diamonds)
- Spiritual resources for Christian living (7)
- The Companion of Youth (not all of it - but his introduction and his advice to young people about Christian life)
- Circulars to SDB and FMA (5)
- Conferences to the Salesians (4)
- The Exercise of devotion to God's mercy (one of his earliest texts commissioned by the Marchioness Barolo when he was looking after the girls).
- Excerpts from the first Rule, both SDB and FMA
- His Spiritual Testament (only parts of this are reproduced in the current appendix to the Constitutions, but many of the missing parts are included in this 'new' version in English)
- Don Bosco's addresses to the Cooperators (his very first at Valdocco, and his final 'salute'' to them before his death)
- a range of other items
If you go to the SDL address indicated by link above (and if the link does not work, choose the English collection and 'B' - Don Bosco - as 'creator), the texts indicated above are the ones which have both the 'MS Word' icon and the 'text only' icon.
This collection will be added to over the next few weeks. There are scattered translations of Don Bosco material in a number of resources that are not widely available: Desramaut's Don Bosco and the Spiritual Life, for example, or Braido's voluminous efforts which are gradually finding their way into English. In fact Kristu Jyoti has just published his Prevention not Repression. 400 pages worth and with an extensive range of Don Bosco's texts on education in particular. Not yet published (because they don't have it yet!) is Braido's Don Bosco the Educator - another 400 pages or so.
New Treasure-trove of Don Bosco Texts
Melbourne: 4 August 2013 --A new treasure-trove of Don Bosco's texts in English is now available on SDL - and more will be added in coming weeks, so keep tuned!
With the final year of preparation for Don Bosco's birth bicentenary just a few months off - and the focus shifting to Don Bosco's spirituality - there will be a much more intense interest in a wide range of his own writings. But the situation for English-speaking readers up until now has been difficult, since but a few of these texts, relatively speaking, are in the public domain in English.
Fr Aldo Giraudo has put together a fine 'new' collection of Don Bosco's writings which evidence his spirituality and particularly his many efforts to pass that spirituality on via sermons, conferences, 'good nights', correspondence, rules and regulations, circulars, books, and dreams. this complete collection with his own introduction and comments is now in the hands of the printer in Salesian India and will be made available in due course.
But the texts - Don Bosco's texts - are all in the public domain in Italian and should be likewise available in English! So in fact they are now available in SDL. Many, in fact the majority, have not been available either in part or in full previously; thier availability now represents an important step forward for the English reader.
What kind of texts are we talking about? There are 77 of them in all, and they cover the following range of genres:
- Don Bosco's correspondence with Salesians and Salesian Sisters (24)
- Don Bosco's correspondence with young people (8)
- Dreams told especially for the boys at the Oratory (3)
- Dreams told especially to Salesians (2 - the Lanzo dream or the Salesian Garden, and the 10 Diamonds)
- Spiritual resources for Christian living (7)
- The Companion of Youth (not all of it - but his introduction and his advice to young people about Christian life)
- Circulars to SDB and FMA (5)
- Conferences to the Salesians (4)
- The Exercise of devotion to God's mercy (one of his earliest texts commissioned by the Marchioness Barolo when he was looking after the girls).
- Excerpts from the first Rule, both SDB and FMA
- His Spiritual Testament (only parts of this are reproduced in the current appendix to the Constitutions, but many of the missing parts are included in this 'new' version in English)
- Don Bosco's addresses to the Cooperators (his very first at Valdocco, and his final 'salute'' to them before his death)
- a range of other items
If you go to the SDL address indicated by link above (and if the link does not work, choose the English collection and 'B' - Don Bosco - as 'creator), the texts indicated above are the ones which have both the 'MS Word' icon and the 'text only' icon.
This collection will be added to over the next few weeks. There are scattered translations of Don Bosco material in a number of resources that are not widely available: Desramaut's Don Bosco and the Spiritual Life, for example, or Braido's voluminous efforts which are gradually finding their way into English. In fact Kristu Jyoti has just published his Prevention not Repression. 400 pages worth and with an extensive range of Don Bosco's texts on education in particular. Not yet published (because they don't have it yet!) is Braido's Don Bosco the Educator - another 400 pages or so.
