The Spanish civil war translated: paratexts, shifts, and (co-)authorship

This paper analyses the Spanish version of Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War, a book that had to face numerous challenges before being finally accepted for publication in Spain. The book, written by a British historian and published in London in 1961, aimed to provide the first account of the Spanish conflict (1936-1939) from a neutral perspective. As a consequence of strict state censorship, the Spanish translation was published in Paris and could not be sold in Spain without special permission from the authorities. Drawing upon Baker’s notions of framing (temporal and spatial) and narrativity (2006), this paper focuses on translation shifts in order to assess whether the original and the translation depict some events in a different way. Genette’s paratextual theory (1997) is also discussed in order to discuss other crucial differences between the editions in English and Spanish.This paper analyses the Spanish version of Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War, a book that had to face numerous challenges before being finally accepted for publication in Spain. The book, written by a British historian and published in London in 1961, aimed to provide the first account of the Spanish conflict (1936-1939) from a neutral perspective. As a consequence of strict state censorship, the Spanish translation was published in Paris and could not be sold in Spain without special permission from the authorities. Drawing upon Baker’s notions of framing (temporal and spatial) and narrativity (2006), this paper focuses on translation shifts in order to assess whether the original and the translation depict some events in a different way. Genette’s paratextual theory (1997) is also discussed in order to discuss other crucial differences between the editions in English and Spanish.C