Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in Catalan and Spanish translation

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Catalan and Spanish translations of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia published by Ariel in 1969 and 1970 (respectively) from two perspectives: that of the censorship files preserved at the Archivo General de la Administración in Alcalá de Henares, and that of the published translations. First, relevant information is provided on the setting in which those translations were published, as regards institutionalised censorship and the reception of Orwell’s work under Franco. This is followed by analysis of data from the files and from the texts. Such an analysis allows us to determine in the present case that, whereas the censor’s injunctions were mostly followed by the publisher, advantage was also taken of the censor’s hesitations to preserve as much of the source text’s memorial content as possible in the translations. Results of the analysis are finally linked with general concepts at the interface of translation and memory studies. If translators and publishers are seen as secondary witnesses in accounts of traumatic events, then censors may be regarded as tertiary witnesses, and censored texts as sites of dialectic tension between memory and forgetting.

KEYWORDS:

• George Orwell
• Homage to Catalonia
• Catalan translation
• Spanish translation
• censorship
• memory and forgetting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Josep Marco is currently Professor of Literary Translation and Translation Studies at Universitat Jaume I (Castelló, Spain). His main research interests lie in the areas of the translation of style, corpus-based translation studies, translator education and the history of literary translation into Catalan. He is a member of the COVALT research group. He is also a practising literary translator into Catalan and Spanish.

Notes

1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from languages other than English are the author’s.

2 Records at the Archivo General de la Administración in Alcalá de Henares are identified by file and box numbers.

3 ‘No se puede afirmar que haya sido el “pueblo” español quien se opuso al Movimiento nacional, sino las organizaciones obreras socialistas, comunistas y anarquistas que prácticamente poseían el monopolio del sindicalismo obrero’.

4 ‘No puede llamarse tibiamente izquierdista a un Gobierno del Frente popular que dias [sic] antes del Movimiento nacional se declaró por boca de uno de sus miembros, el Presidente, beligerante frente a las derechas’.

5 ‘Hoy, en 1964, a nuestros XXV años de Paz, puede dejarse que se digan cosas que el tiempo y esa Paz, precisamente, desmiente y hasta hace ridículo y contraproducente para nuestros enemigos’.

6 ‘Y repetimos que España tiene suficiente madurez política ya para conocer versiones de nuestra guerra dadas desde el otro lado’ (Dietta’s emphasis).

7 ‘Creo que, dada la madurez política interior y exterior del Régimen español, su consolidación, y el decaimiento de los movimientos anarquistas internacionales, la obra […] puede autorizarse con tachaduras’ (Massa’s emphasis).

8 I am indebted for suggestions to include references to the reception of Land and Freedom in Spain, and of Lorca’s work in late Francoism to one of the reviewers of an earlier draft of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [FFI2015–68867–P] and Universitat Jaume I [UJI-B2017-58].