In 1826, the Essai politique sur l'Île de Cuba appeared in Paris. It formed just one small part of Alexander von Humboldt's multi-volume Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent – 1805–1839), which was based on his travels between 1799 and 1804 to the Americas with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland. A work which in its time was compulsory reading for industrialists and mineralogists, traders, travellers and natural philosophers alike, the Essai politique sur l'Île de Cuba is a particularly pertinent subject for retranslation for two reasons. First, it is a central text in studies of the culture, politics and history of the New World at the end of the colonial era; and second, it has circulated in the anglophone world for over a century and a half in a rendering by John Sidney Thrasher that radically misrepresented Humboldt's views on slavery and which Humboldt himself publicly disowned.

The modern edition at last does justice to Humboldt's work in a number of different ways. It not only offers a careful retranslation and comprehensive commentary upon the French original, including high-quality foldouts of Humboldt's two Cuba maps as well as all his own footnotes and tables. A list of the works on which Humboldt himself drew as he compiled his text is also extremely useful in enabling us to understand the positioning of his account within the (already immense) corpus of scientific, economic and political writing available at the time. While Humboldt's narratives were rarely linear, the indices of places, people and subjects appended to this edition now allow the modern reader to navigate with welcome ease around the Political Essay in ways previously well-nigh impossible. Just how complex an undertaking it was to steer the Essai politique through this modern retranslation is exemplified in the names of three translators and three annotators given on the title page. They stand as a testament to the sheer range of Humboldt's knowledge, and also encourage us to reflect on the achievements of Humboldt's nineteenth-century translators, who were working without the benefits of modern technology and probably under greater pressure of time.

The ‘Editorial note’ to Kutzinski and Ette's edition also invites us to consider how very difficult it remains to translate Humboldt for a modern audience: how to ensure the readability of the translation without losing accuracy and completeness, how to deal with nineteenth-century racial terminology, and how best to tackle the vibrantly multilingual quality of Humboldt's prose. Humboldt's style, above all, is perhaps the hardest aspect to capture convincingly, and the editors and translation team have ably steered a middle course between giving their narrative a somewhat archaic ring, and an obviously too colloquial, modern rendering.

As a scholar working at the intersection between history of science and translation studies I remain sceptical of the editors’ claim that in this new edition we ‘read what Alexander von Humboldt actually wrote’ (p. xxiii). The content and political agenda articulated in this translation undoubtedly align it far more closely with the aims of Humboldt's original than was ever intended for Thrasher's rendering. But since translation always implies mediation and necessarily embodies processes of transposition, transfer and change – not least in the modernizations the editors themselves outline – I would be cautious of wishing to cast it as in some way identical to the original. Rather, I would suggest that Kutzinski and Ette's edition of the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba should be understood as a retranslation that will swiftly acquire canonical status and make a seminal contribution to the continuously evolving history of Humboldt's work in the anglophone world.