Carmen CAMUS CAMUS (University of Cantabria, Spain)

The Censored Discourse in Anthologies and Collections of the Far West

This paper analyses the incidence of censorship in the translation of the anthologies and collections of short stories dealing with the Far West. This study derives from a broader research project which, in the ideological context of the Franco regime (1939-1975), investigates the influence of official state censorship and self-censorship on English-Spanish translations of Westerns and their cultural influence on the Spanish polysystem. During Franco’s dictatorship all works in Spain had to be submitted to the Board of Censorship to obtain authorisation for publication or exhibition. The files opened for each individual work are kept at the Administration’s General Archive (AGA), a procedure that has left enough traces to allow the reconstruction of the translation and censorship process to which works were submitted. Although in the western genre the publication of translated works in anthologies and collections was not a conspicuous practice, there is evidence that western narrative also appeared in this format. This paper offers a case study of the incidence of Spanish censorship on the translation process by which some of Ernest Haycox short stories gathered in collections were transferred into the Spanish culture and attempts to unveil if the translation policy for this type of publication was similar to that for the genre as a whole.
The overall incidence of censorship for the genre between 1939 and 1975 was 11.2%, of which 8% corresponded to works that underwent suppressions and 3.2% to works which were denied authorisation. The global study for the genre has revealed the existence of a subtle state policy to use the translations of the western genre to promote a cultural change in accordance with the postulates of Franco’s regime. The cuts and modifications introduced in the Spanish target texts were aimed at reinforcing the ideology of the dictatorship. The study is framed within the Descriptive Studies paradigm and uses the TRACE methodology (TRAnslations CEnsored). Textual analysis proceeds in three phases preliminary, macrotextual and microtextual: the preliminary analysis focuses on the reception of the works in the sociocultural context; the macrotextual study examines suppressions and other modifications made to extensive text segments (chapters and paragraphs); and the microtextual analysis identifies the shifts of meaning in coupled pairs of translation units, and correlates them with pragmatic effects attributed to censorship. This three-phase approach aims at uncovering the norms that underlie the translation process and to establish whether the translators favoured acceptability or adequacy. The paper investigates the transfer process that Ernest Haycox’s short stories underwent in their passage from English into Spanish and compares the incidence of censorship for the works presented in collections with the overall 11.2% for the genre. Analysis at the microtextual level will yield evidence of self-censorship in the translation process and establish whether the shifts of meaning favoured the postulates of the regime. The divergences between the textual manifestations are contrasted and related to the reception of the works in the Spanish culture, and the alterations are studied to determine whether Haycox’s works published in anthologies and collections were censored in order to adapt the final product to the cultural and political expectations of the time.