Looby, Robert Censorship, Translation and English Language Fiction in People's Poland (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 348 the ways Nabokov attempted to expand his ‘sphere of influence by controlling aspects of book production’ (p. 137) usually reserved for the publisher. Using Gérard Gennette’s theory of peritexts (blurbs, puffs and cover art), epitexts and paratexts, White offers an insightful elucidation of the significance of forewords, blurbs and the cover designs of various editions of Nabokov’s books. He also convincingly claims that manipulating such textual forums as forewords and interviews, Nabokov ‘carefully constructed a public persona’ (p. 176) as well as used ‘the public space afforded [to] him to assert his place in the hierarchies of the cultural field’ (p. 180; here White is, naturally, indebted to Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual thinking). Although perhaps lacking ground-breaking interpretations of Nabokov’s canonical novels, White’s study offers a refreshing new perspective on Nabokov’s life and work. Nabokov and his Books succeeds in shifting the paradigm and invites us to enjoy the ‘old books’ precisely as books — material objects that trigger an experience of rereading. Department of Russian Studies Yuri Leving Dalhousie University Looby, Robert. Censorship, Translation and English Language Fiction in People’s Poland. Approaches to Translation Studies, 41. Brill Rodopi, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2016. 230 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €58.00: $75.00 (paperback). To read in a book on censorship that censorship and totalitarianism are bedmates should not surprise anyone, but it is much less predictable to come across a comment that censorship may be considered ‘a very condition of free expression’ (p. 8). Yet it is exactly with this confrontation of diverging views that Robert Looby opens his study on censorship in Communist Poland. His much needed book, avoiding obvious generalizations and problematizing its subject, is based on thorough and pioneering research in the archives of the Main Office for Control of the Press, Publications and Public Performances, as well as of other state institutions, which has resulted in a rich documentation of cases of state control and manipulation. But in his book Looby also presents equally interesting effects of his comparative analyses of hundreds of Englishlanguage books and their Polish translations. The vastness of the material has been judiciously limited by the author who concentrated only on censorship of literature in translation, and more specifically, on Polish translations of English-language novels and short stories published in 1944–89. Though Looby’s monograph does not address the issue of censoring original Polish writing, which is the field where censorship showed REVIEWS 349 its ugliest face, banning books, articles, magazines, and sentencing authors to non-being, his panoramic view of censorship may still, in turns, shock, amuse and terrify. Looby’s decision to focus exclusively on literature in translation is well judged; it invites us to look for parallels between the two types of interventions, or two kinds of re-writing: censorship and translation. Translation, being a process of selection and adjustment, comes dangerously close to censoring, when the translator consciously or unconsciously corrects or suppresses, specifies or highlights elements of the source text. Looby’s main interest is institutionalized censorship, but he is equally concerned about the inner censorship which manifested itself in the decisions of individual translators. His narrative follows then the two paths. He cites from the documents from the Censorship Office, illustrating how administrative officials intervened in the works, but he also laboriously collates English-language originals with their Polish renderings in order to find out cases of translators’ departures from the original senses of source texts. Though the two kinds of censorship, institutional and self-imposed, often merge, they represent two different types of problems. Looby is aware that some of the changes he discovers in translations may have been effected not by the pressures of the political regime, but by cultural and linguistic differences. What counts as censoring, and what comes in effect of any process of interlinguistic translation is often hard to define. What is most valuable in Looby’s monograph is the author’s concern with the various fields in which censorship operated in Coummunist Poland. Even when limited to literature in translation, censoring occurred on every stage of the publishing process, starting from the selection of...