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.