The afterlife of Francoist cultural policies: censorship and translation in the Catalan and Spanish literary market

The intention of this article is to challenge current trends in the study of censorship under Franco by focusing on the changing function of a number of translated works published both in Franco’s and democratic Spain. The goal is threefold: first, to demonstrate the key role of translation in the Catalan cultural recovery of the 1960s; second, to prove that the impact of censorship on the Spanish publishing industry extends well beyond Franco’s regime, because publishers are still reissuing works that were expurgated by the censors; third, to explore the links between historical memory, cultural artefacts, and censorship and reflect on the status that should be given to the books published during the dictatorship. This article demonstrates that after the regime’s downfall, expurgated works have been subjected to four different strategies: a) some have never been republished; b) some have been reprinted without any modification; c) some have been retranslated; d) some have undergone a thematic and/or linguistic revision