Censorship as mise en

forme

Francesca Billiani
 Working definitions
 My definition of translation, or my
understanding of the act of
translation, is not that of a merely
act of linguistic transposition (with all
the sophisticated discussion one
could have about it) but of
translation as discourse through
which symbolic and economic capital
is traded and exchanged within a
given literary field.
 Translation
 Is an aesthetic and linguistic
discourse which generates cultural
plurality and movement within and
across a geographical and
geopolitical space.
 Translation in this instance is seen as
a force producing movement.
 Metaphor
 Translation is therefore a metonimyc
process, and translators make choices,
setting priorities for their translations in
decision-making processes that have
ideological implications. Translators’
choices also establish a place of
enunciation and a context of affiliation for
the translator and the translation
(Tymoczko, 2010, p. 8)
 Aims
 What is censorship?
 How does censorship work?
 Key factors: Power structures and
ideology.
 Examples from different media and
national contexts.
 Role of the translator: the case of
self-censorship.
 Transnational
 as the analytical effort of tracing
flows of meaning across and within
national variations, following the
leading trajectory delineated by any
given paradigm and by any shared
social design.
 Histoire croisée
 From the perspective of an histoire
croisée,the translational is not to be
seen as a level above, but something
which interacts with the georgraphy
of the national level to design a
history “à géométrie variable”.
Censorship-Research trajectory
 Investigate the apparent paradox between
the idea of culture as a national product
and the key position translations have
always occupied within a literary and
cultural field.
 In other words, the research asked how
did culture negotiate through translation
its relationship with the State and its
institutions and to what extent it did
conform with the necessity both of
adapting and of preserving its
independence?
 Research questions
 How to tell/portray a national
history by listening to/ and
incorporating its foreign voices?
 And how to tell the intricate
narratives of translations?
 Research questions
 How to theorise the relationship they
necessarily establish between modes
of cultural production and modes of
political repression and control over
elite/popular culture in order to
create a transnational space?
 Shift
 ‘away from technical questions about
how to translate per se towards
larger ethical and political
perspectives on the activity of
translating, on the functions of
translation products in relation to
power, and on the agency of
translators. (Tymoczko, 2010, p. 5)
 Censorship
 “Censorship may be either
preventive or punitive, according to
whether it is exercised before or
after the expression has been made
public.”
 It exercise power over the
transmission of a certain message.
 It usually occurs in an heavily
ideologically loaded context.
 Censorship is a coercive and forceful act
that blocks, manipulates and controls
crosscultural interaction in various ways.
It must be understood as one of the
discourses, and often the dominant one,
articulated by a given society at a given
time and expressed through repressive
cultural, aesthetic, linguistic and economic
practices.
 Ideology
 FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS-dominant
beliefs
 ‘system of thought which popagates
systemic falsehood in the selfish
interest of the powerful and malign
forces dominating a particular
historical era’ (Hawkes 1996: 12).
 e.g. capitalism, socialism, fascism as
systems of ideas
 Censorship usually operates in an
ideologically loaded context; however, the
assumption must be that
 Ideology is not simply a ‘false
consciousness’, an illusory representation
of reality, it is reality itself;
 ‘ideological is not the ‘false consciousness
of a social being’ but this being in so far
as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’.
 Censorship to reveal
 Intracultural functions of the
products and processes of
translation;
 Perception of difference and self-
reflexivity about perspective in
relation to the nature of translation
in diverse cultural contexts.
(Tymoczko, 2010, p. 5)
 Visibility and Invisibility
 It is the degree of exposure of the
symbolic capital of the artefact, the
discourses on in or the materiality of art
that determines its relationship with the
censor and the processes whereby it
becomes part of the totalitarian machine.
 both censorship and translation
influence the visibility and invisibility,
as well as the accessibility and
inaccessibility, of the cultural capital
enjoyed or produced by a given text
or body of texts.
 Institutional and individual.
 Foucault (1975) argues that the
production and representation of
knowledge depend on the ways in
which any social system articulates a
set of rules.
 Panoption power.
 Hegemony
 ‘results from the specific dialectic
between what we call logistics of
difference and of equivalence. Social
actors occupy differential positions
within the discourse that constitute
the social fabric. […] It becomes
necessary however to represent the
totality of the chain’ (Laclau-Mouffe,
2001, p. xiii)
 Antagonism
 Antagonism is fundamental to the
existence of democratic politics.
 Censorship reduces antagonism and
democracy.
 Inertia
 Because of their size and invisibility,
THEIR INERTIA, the censorial
apparatus could largely ignore
translations at the beginning, by
implicitly labelling them peripheral
cultural enterprises.
 Communicative System
 “translation can no longer be
analyzed in isolation, but…should be
studied as part of a whole system of
texts and the people who produce,
support, propagate, oppose, censor
them” (Lefevere in Hermans
1999:44)
 Power structure-selective choices

 Institutional censorship
 Market strategies
 Cultural conventions
 Aesthetic conventions
 Social conventions
 Self-censorship
 Cultural spaces between Familiar and Alien
 Micro-history
 By concentrating not exclusively on how
an organisation functions but on how it
imagines it ought to function, narrate, and
represent itself as well as on the interplay
between micro and grand narratives, we
can illustrate how the structures producing
translations (publishing houses or literary
magazines), the narratives they unfold,
and the discourses about them (political
propaganda) form a transnational
‘aesthetics of polylingualism in literary
production’ (Bandia 2008: 139).
 Micro-history

 we can profitably use translation as a

forceful microhistorical narrative
phenomenon to shed new light on
Grand National narratives of
transnational political and aesthetic
significance.
 in its consideration of transnational
dynamics of taste, Bourdieu’s definition of
structural censorship allows us to view the
phenomenology of translation and
censorship in terms of both its national
specificity and a repertoire of universal
themes (for instance sexuality, religion
and ideology) shared by different
communities at different times of their
history (Bourdieu 1982:168-73).
 In this respect, censorship has to be
seen not as an institutional set of
rules, or even as an overtly
repressive means of controlling
public opinion and discourses, but
rather as a set of unwritten rules,
shaped both by current habitus and
by the symbolic capital a text enjoys
in a certain field.
 Elite and Popular
 Macchiavelli’s The Prince (banned in
France in 1576); The Thousand and
One Nights (banned in the US in
1927); H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (banned in Russia in 1852);
and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (banned
in China in1931), among many
others.
 Second Culture/Intelligentsia
Subculture
 Similarly, the translations of entire
oeuvres have been banned at
different times; for example, André
Gide’s works were banned in 1938 in
the Soviet Union and in 1954 in East
Berlin, and Upton Sinclair’s were
banned in 1929 in Yugoslavia, in
1933 in Germany and in 1956 in East
Germany.
 Tropes
 depending on whether we view it as
a metaphor of the Other, or as a
synecdoche which enables us to use
translation to talk about one
particular part of the discourse, or as
irony which implies distance in either
positive or negative terms, and
finally as a metonymy which implies
reducing its meaning in a given
circumstance.
 Censorship: dates
 13 November 1934 – circular N. A. I. 47
on compulsory pre-publication check on
proofs and not necessarily on the final
book.
 1936 – compulsory pre-publications
checks on final proofs.
 1938 circular N. 11.35 – publishers have
to ask formal permission on translations to
be sent in the original and not in proofs.
 Estetica del popolare
 Translations promoted an
‘esteticizzazione verso il basso di
pratiche comuni di lettura a diverse
classi di lettori’ and this is what the
regime itself sponsored and
championed about foreign popular
novels in translation.
 Censorship does not necessarily
always apply to individual texts. In
the context of censorship, the name
of the author and that of the
translator can gain considerable
importance: in other words,
institutional censorship can officially
reject a text not only because of its
content but also because of the
author’s profile or indeed the
 In Fascist Italy, translations by
authors such as Thomas Mann and
André Gide were banned because
they were believed to be Jewish
(Fabre 1998). Similarly, entire
genres may be subjected to
censorship.
 Both in Fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany,
translations of detective stories, for
example, were banned as a genre a priori
during the last years of the dictatorship
because of the popularity they had gained
among readers. These stories were
thought to constitute a vehicle for
importing perilous and immoral examples
of antisocial behaviour.
 until 1968 dramatic productions in
the UK were subject to approval by
the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which
determined what plays could or could
not be performed (Krebs 2007a,
2007b; Walton 2006, 2007; see
#DRAMA##).
 Cinema
 Imported cinema has often been
subjected to various forms of
censorship through dubbing and
subtitling. While reading might be
seen as a private act, screening
occurs in front of a purportedly
vulnerable and visible audience
(Jones 2001:164-67).
 Spanish Cinema During the
Franco Regime
 Sabrina’s 1955 dubbing allows us to
take a glance at early Francoist film
manipulations.
 The 1964 dubbings of Stalag 17 and
The Seven Year Itch, typical products
of the Regime’s post-1963 cultural
politics, illustrate how important a
player Billy Wilder was in the process
of Spain’s timid cultural opening
(apertura) around 1963.
 1955
 Democracy can be a wickedly unfair thing,
Sabrina. Nobody poor was ever called democratic
for marrying somebody rich.
 La democracia suele ser injusta en sus
apreciaciones, Sabrina… Los demócratas… no
consideran como tal al pobre que se casa con un
rico.
 Democracy is usually unfair in its interpretations,
Sabrina… Democrats… don’t consider the poor as
such [=democratic] when they marry the rich.
 LARRABEE Sr.: I only hope you remember what
to do with a girl...
 LINUS: It’ll come back to me, it’s like riding a
bicycle.
 LARRABEE Sr.: Supongo que no habrás olvidado
como se conquista a una chica.
 LINUS: Ya lo recordaré… Es como volver a tocar
el piano.
 LARRABEE Sr.: I guess you haven’t forgotten how
to win a girl’s heart.
 LINUS: I’ll remember… It’s like playing the piano
again.

 1964

 - Oh! You feel the breeze of the

subway? Isn’t it delicious?
 - (horny look) It sort of cools the
ankles, doesn’t it?
 - ¡Oh! ¿Nota la brisa del metro? ¡Oh!,
¡qué sensación!
 - (voz en off) Refresca los tobillos,
¿verdad?
 - Oh! Do you [polite] feel the breeze of
the subway? Oh! What a nice feeling.
 - It cools the ankles, doesn’t it?

 Drama in the U.K.
 ‘If censorship is a technique by which
discursive practices are maintained,
and if social life largely consists of
such practices, it follows that
censorship is the norm rather than
the exception. Censorship
materializes everywhere.’ (Post
1998, 2)
The Lord Chamberlain Office, Theatre
Regulation Act 1843-1968- Blue pencil
 Manuela: Well, in the first place it’s
not well bred. Father says to me:
“Never show your feelings. It’s not
even decent”.
 Oda: Is that so – well then, you must
have indecent feelings.
 Manuela: I? Indecent feelings?
(Winsloe 1932:32; original
emphasis).
 Licence – It is foreign, not
British
 […] the child becomes passionately
devoted to the teacher, the affection
is undoubtedly unhealthy but there is
nothing to suggest it is unclean and
such a feeling is by no means
uncommon between a young girl and
a kind teacher […] (Buckmaster,
cited by Shellard & Nicholson
2004:114)
Christa Winsloe, Gestern in heute 1930
(Barbara Burnham,Children in Uniform)
 Head: […] and cried out your sinfulness
before them all (Winsloe 1932:7).
 Fraülein [sic] v. Bernburg: (Painfully) You
must not love me so much, It is wrong, it
is harmful – it is a sin (Winsloe 1932:30).
 Head: […] When that depraved little girl
cried out her sin and perversity (Winsloe
1932:36).
 Conclusion
 Translations were conceived as a
collective, shared popular
experience. And, as far as they were
collective and not individual
experiences, it could have been
privately tolerated as part of the
regime’s political ambition at
creating a new aesthetics for the
masses.
 Bibliography
Bandia, Paul, Translation as Reparation (St Jerome,
Manchester, 2008)
 Ben-Ari, Nitsa (2010) ‘Reclaiming the Erotic: Hebrew
Translations from 1930 to 1980’, in Tymoczko (2010), pp.
129-48
 Billiani, Francesca, Modes of Censorship and Translation
(St. Jerome: Manchester, 2007).
 Billiani, Francesca ‘Aesthetic Censorship?’, Frame, 21.2.,
2008, pp. 61-76
 Billiani, Francesca ‘Censorship’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of
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parler veut dire, (Librarie Arthème Fayar: Paris, 1982), pp.
167-205
 Bibliography
 Brownlie, Siobhan (2007) 'Examining Self-Censorship:
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 Bibliography
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