Affective Matters: Translation, Censorship, and the Circulation of “Romans-à-clef” from Argentina to Franco’s Spain (1960-1980)
Creators: Monzon Rodriguez, Sofia
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2023

<p>During the Francoist regime in Spain, literary translations into Spanish and Catalan were, along with domestic literary works, subject to the publishing guidelines established to control the cultural production and circulation of literature. Archival investigations unearthed an overlooked translation phenomenon in which a substantial flow of Argentinian-made translations was scrutinized by the Francoist censorship board. Focusing on translational exchanges that took place between Franco’s Spain and Argentina during the 1960s-1980s, this dissertation explores different editions of novels written by Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell in translation that traveled between South America and the Iberian Peninsula and contrasts them and their receptions with the Spanish and Catalan target texts carried out domestically. Taking a combination of relational and affect-based approaches to translation production and reception, this investigation employs micro and macro levels of analysis to understand the inner workings of literary translation and its circulation in the context of censorship. It offers a thorough study of the networks of actors involved in the translation processes of the corpus of texts (rewriters, censors, editors, publishers, and readers) with the aim of tracing translation, self-censorship, institutional censorship, negotiations, exchanges, compliance, or resistance to such translation flows. After assembling the actor-networks that facilitated or resisted the translation of the selected works into Spanish and Catalan, it explores the role of “affect” in the actors’ decision-making towards the texts in their different stages (i.e., source texts, translation drafts, negotiations and communication between actors, final target texts, as well as their circulation and reception). By analyzing “affective responses” recorded by the different actors during the editorial, censorial, and translational processes via extratextual and archival documents related to the source and target texts, this work follows the material traces and material existences of the texts in translation, their processes, their becoming, their deletions, and transformations. This study seeks to track the actors, connect their networks, and understand the role of the agents involved in the circulation of the &quot;romans-à-clef&quot; under analysis in order to determine how and why these works were translated, and, ultimately, the conditions under which they were produced, circulated, and consumed from Argentina to Franco’s Spain. It concludes with an understanding of the factors that influenced the circulation and consumption of this kind of literature in Spanish and Catalan, with a focus on the importance that affect, linguistic accessibility by means of register and tone, as well as general accessibility relating to numbers of potential consumers played in the ultimate fate of whether these books were approved or rejected by Spanish censors.</p>