Abstract
After the end of the Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco established a right-wing dictatorship which was to last for decades, until his death in 1975. From the beginning, the new regime set up a censorship system that rigidly restricted the circulation of ideas and texts all over the country, including translation of foreign literature. Making extensive use of the official reports available at the Spanish censorship archives, this chapter explores the cultural and ideological forces at work when, over the years, attempts were made to translate some Nabokov novels like Pnin, Ada and his masterpiece, Lolita. This critical inquiry also aims to shed some light on the complex and often-neglected subject of the interrelation between politics and translation.
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Notes
- 1.
In those decades, the only other authoritarian regime in Western Europe was the Estado Novo (1933–1974) in Portugal, so that the two states in the Iberian Peninsula were ruled by right-wing dictators: Franco and Salazar. For insightful views on translating practices in this historical context, see Seruya’s (2010) “Translation in Portugal during the Estado Novo regime.”
- 2.
The censorship records for all books published in the country during the Francoist regime are now open to the public at the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA), the governmental organism located in Alcalá de Henares (near Madrid), which paradoxically is the birthplace of the greatest writer in Spanish history: Miguel de Cervantes. Each file is identified by a code with several numbers, followed by the last two digits of the year in which it was opened, as in 1234/64. Throughout this chapter, file numbers will appear in parentheses, and the censors’ comments will be translated into English. Unfortunately, as Herrero-Odriozola (2007) notes, many AGA files are either lost or missing (p. xv).
- 3.
Likewise, in Translating literature, the late André Lefevere (1992) discusses briefly the question of ideology, stating that what all translators want, first of all, is “getting their work published,” a goal which is easier to reach if the resulting text “is not in conflict with standards for acceptable behavior in the target culture: with that culture’s ideology”; he adds that if that were not the case, “translators may have to adapt the text so that the offending passages are either severely modified or left out altogether” (p. 87). Once again, these commonsensical notions by a leading voice in Translation Studies perfectly illustrate what happened for decades in Spain with the vast majority of Nabokov’s novels.
- 4.
In her book Nabokov Translated. A Comparison of Nabokov’s Russian and English Prose, Grayson (1977) refers to the resulting text as “a delightful, ingenious, and wholly ‘readable’ piece of work” (p. 19). Both the author and the main character of Alice in Wonderland would resurface in Nabokov’s career decades later when writing Lolita.
- 5.
Nabokov (1973) defended himself from attacks in his essay “A reply to my critics”, which ended by referring to Wilson’s review in unmistakable terms: “His article, entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation” (p. 266). According to Beaujour (1995), “Nabokov did not really believe that Pushkin should be translated. The commentary is in fact the heart of the ‘Onegin Project’, and the translation ‘proper’ is of minor importance, almost a pretext” (p. 717).
- 6.
In the second volume of his excellent biography, Boyd (1993b) records that the author “received a haunting description (clear day, mild wind, lake, gasoline-scented air) of the burning of six thousand copies of the unsatisfactory Swedish translations of his books on a garbage dump near Stockholm: two thousand copies apiece of the first and second editions of Lolita and the sole edition of Pnin”, (p. 386). This incident is also explored in Schiff’s (1999) Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Véra (Mrs. Nabokov), which amply reveals that—as in everything else—husband and wife totally agreed on the strict control over foreign translations.
- 7.
Merino and Rabadán are linked to a major research project based at the University of León, and formed by Spanish scholars nationwide since 1997: “The TRACE (TRAnslation and CEnsorship) project deals with the coordinated study of censorship in the translation of different text types (narrative, poetic, theatrical and audiovisual) in Spain during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” http://trace.unileon.es/?page_id=189
- 8.
It is quite revealing that, in the opening pages of The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel, Mooney (2008) should connect the censoring systems in Francoist Spain and the Soviet Union (p. 6–7). Nabokov’s works were banned for decades in the USSR, and the author died years before the collapse of the Soviet regime.
- 9.
Widely known nationally, Manuel Fraga (1922–2012) was a towering conservative politician in recent Spanish history, with a long and controversial career spanning from the second half of the dictatorship to founding a right-wing party in democracy. His obituary in The New York Times discusses his mixed legacy and mentions the 1966 Press Law:
To the Spanish left, Mr. Fraga was a reviled reminder of a right-wing government that kept Spain isolated from Europe and the rest of the world for decades. Defenders, however, note that he promulgated a Franco-era law that did away with media censorship, seen as a hint of change in the hard-line government. As tourism minister, he worked to open Spain to the outside world. (“Manuel”, 2012)
- 10.
Five years before, he had offered in another interview what might arguably be the most detailed explanation of his politics:
The fact that since my youth—I was 19 when I left Russia—my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. (Nabokov 1973: 34–35)
- 11.
References to Spain are also hard to locate in the biography of his wife, Schiff’s (1999) Véra (Mrs. Nabokov). Undeniably, in his most famous novel names like Lolita and Dolores, or the Carmen motif do possess a distinct Spanish flavor.
- 12.
Boyd also briefly adds that the influential literary critic Harry Levin—Nabokov’s closest friend on campus—once sharply replied on this subject: “Harvard thinks otherwise” (quoted in 1993b: 213). The challenging Lectures on Don Quixote were published posthumously in 1983, 6 years after Nabokov’s death in 1977; first translated in 1987, this is obviously not one of his most popular books among Spanish readers.
- 13.
In his survey on publishing houses during the Francoist dictatorship, Tiempo de editores: Historia de la edición en España, 1939–1975, Moret (2002) also notes that Caralt published both commercial and quality literature (pp. 52–62). Most of the firms he surveys are located in Barcelona, the capital of Spanish publishing.
- 14.
The translator was José María Riba Ricart, who, according to the catalogue of the Spanish National Library (Biblioteca Nacional de España, BNE), rendered into Spanish several European novels in the postwar period.
- 15.
For an informative overview of the many problems Nabokov faced when trying to publish his novel in the USA and other countries, see Feeney’s (1993) article “Lolita and Censorship: A Case Study”; for deeper views on this subject, see also chapter 3 in Mooney’s (2008) book The artistic censoring of sexuality: fantasy and judgment in the twentieth-century novel, entitled “Lolita: American mimetic fantasy, ethical reading and censoring narrative.”
- 16.
It is a revealing coincidence that, a few years later, Pomaire also presented for translation another controversial work of fiction such as Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (Gómez Castro 2009: 137).
- 17.
On the topic of The New Yorker and Pnin, see chapter three in Dimant’s (2013) thorough book. Regarding the political contents of this campus novel, it is also worth noting that Spanish censors did not eliminate Nabokov’s bitter denunciation of Nazi concentration camps.
- 18.
Only 1 year later, in 1968, Pnin became the first work by Nabokov to be translated into Catalan, one of the two languages spoken in Catalonia (Northeast Spain), even though under Franco the use of Spanish regional languages was restricted.
- 19.
The disparity between the two censors neatly illustrates the arbitrariness of the Francoist censoring system, a topic which has been frequently debated. In his book on H. G. Wells and Francoist censorship, Lázaro (2004) offers an illuminating analysis of the opposing views in this critical debate.
- 20.
As a matter of fact, the film would not premiere in Spain until after Franco’s death, and with a very different title: ¡El salto del tigre! In “Nabokov and cinema”, Wyllie (2005) remarks: “In April 1968, prior to the publication of King, queen, knave (Nabokov’s new translation of Korol’, dama, valet), a $100,000 contract for the movie rights had already been negotiated”; she then adds about this unremarkable West-German production that “At the Cannes Film Festival in 1972, Polish film-maker Jerzy Skolimowski’s adaptation of King, queen, knave, starring Gina Lollobrigida and David Niven, was nominated for the Palme D’Or” (p. 218).
- 21.
It is highly revealing of the way the so-called Transición (“transition”) was carried out in post-Franco Spain that one of the seven men who ‘fathered’ the Spanish Constitution of 1978 was none other than Manuel Fraga, who only 12 years before had been the Minister responsible for the 1966 Press Law under Franco.
- 22.
On the reception that the Spanish censorship gave another famously controversial novel of the time, see Gómez Castro’s (2009) “Censorship in Francoist Spain and the Importation of Translation from South America: the Case of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine.”
- 23.
The case of Grijalbo merits special comment since it was a publishing house founded in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War by a leftist exile, Joan Grijalbo, who years later was allowed to open a branch in Barcelona. In his overview of Spanish publishing, Moret (2002) quotes Joan Grijalbo stating that he regularly consulted Publishers Weekly in order to know which novels should be translated (pp. 164–167).
- 24.
Ironically, years later it was revealed that Tejedor’s rendering omitted problematic passages in Nabokov’s masterpiece. Translations of six other Nabokov novels were published in Spain soon after Franco’s death: three in 1976, ¡Mira a los arlequines! (Look at the harlequins! 1974), Barra siniestra (Bend sinister, 1947), and Ada (Ada, 1969); one in 1977, Pálido fuego (Pale fire, 1962); and two in 1978, La verdadera vida de Sebastian Knight (The real life of Sebastian Knight, 1941), and La dádiva (The gift, 1963). In addition, La defensa (The defense, 1964) came out in 1981, and Cosas transparentes (Transparent things, 1972) in 1985. A multi-volume edition of Nabokov’s complete works is currently being published in Spain: volumes III (Novelas 1941–1957; 2006) and IV (Novelas 1962–1974; 2008) have appeared so far.
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Guijarro González, J.I. (2017). Nothing but Sex from Beginning to End: Censorship in Translating Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels in Spain During the Francoist Dictatorship (1939–1975). In: Albakry, M. (eds) Translation and the Intersection of Texts, Contexts and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53748-1_7
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