Translation and censorship

Abstract

This article examines the 1940 translation of Robert Burns into Spanish. The edition was published a year after the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), in a country which had been governed by a left-wing democratic coalition and now was ruled by a repressive dictatorship. Despite being printed by one of the new publishing houses set up by the regime, the 1940 translation recontextualized Burns's poems to challenge official discourses. By examining the difficult conditions under which literature was produced and the translators’ deployment of different literary strategies such as self-censorship and the rearrangement of individual poems, this article demonstrates how Robert Burns: Poesía gives a voice to those who lost the war and to the suppressed minority cultures of Spain. More generally, it reveals how dissident ideas within the regime were expressed through literary translation as early as 1940.