ROME: 11 March 2014 -- In his presentation (written) of
the 1st volume of the 'Fonti salesiane' or Salesian Sources,
a work presented last week to GC27, the RM has this to say:
"This first volume, in Italian and the languages it
will be translated into, is entrusted to every
Salesian. Each of us, beginning from our initial formation,
should have a personal copy of it. It should be like a
“vademecum” or handbook, essential for knowledge of Don
Bosco and thus for loving, imitating, and calling upon our
dear Father. Without love there is no desire to get to know
him, but without this knowledge we will not grow in love. It
is my special wish that there will be a serious and
systematic study of these Salesian sources during our
initial formation."
So where do we go from here?. In fact the translation of this work into English has
been in progress for quite some time, and a good part of the
volume is already available.
All told the Italian edition has some 300 plus
documents and runs to more than 1300 pages (the above pic
gives one an idea of its thickness).
Whatever is eventually done about a printed version of
this in English is not as important, perhaps, as ensuring that
the documents themselves are made available as soon as
possible.
With this in mind, a process has already been set in
place that will enable the interested reader which, if one is
to take the RM's words above literally, would be all of us, to
access the growing list of this material available in English.
It is being placed in the English collection on SDL, the
Salesian Digital Library, as and when it becomes available.
There are two possibilities here:
(1) if you wish to have the entire work in one file,
then it is available here to the point of completion in
English translation. If you were searching for that without
the link, then you would go to the English collection, search
under the 'subjects'
tab for 'Salesian Sources (under 'S' in the horizontal
alphabetical bar you will be confronted with), and select the
'Salesian_sources'
item with (1) file in it. This will be constantly
updated on a weekly basis so expect it to grow!
(2) if you want individual documents, then you have several
ways you can find them. Using precisely the same search path,
you select the second item saying 'Salesian_sources_individual_items'
(which currently has 20 items in it) and you will find them
listed. had you searched under the titles tab for either
Fonti salesiane or Salesian Sources you
would also have found these. If you are looking for a
precise document, know its title (as it would be in English)
or the year it was written then the titles and dates tab
respectively would find these items for you.
Just 20 out of 300 and more documents? In fact no.
Probably about 150 of these 300 are already in English, but
they now need to be revised and adjusted to fit into the
format and proper place allotted them in the Fonti salesiane. You can
expect this to be happening constantly, so on any week in the
future, using the search processes indicated above, you will
find more documents.
A good start might well be to take the General Introduction
(which is one of the separately listed items also and could
be found here).
Happy reading.
Now, this is also an appeal. Even at the risk of
doubling up, there is the strong possibility that some of you
for whatever reasons at all, have previously needed and
therefore translated or had translated one or other document
of Don Bosco's (let's leave the MO and the Lives out of this -
of course we have all those, and in spades!). Could you send
such to me at one of the usual austraLasia addresses?
Of course, it can save work, but it is also a valuable form of
international cooperation that meets the kind of situation we
are now in as a Congregation, and a similar appeal has already
turned up some documents that might not otherwise have been
discovered to have already been translated. As I say, even if
there is doubling up, there is always a 'delete' button!
