The work produced by Manuel Abellán in the 1980s was groundbreaking in drawing attention to the workings of the censorship apparatus in Spain under the Franco regime. Other studies have followed over the last twenty-five years, focusing on particular case histories: Hemingway (Laprade 1991), children's literature (Craig 1998), Lawrence and H.G. Wells (Lázaro 2004; 2005), Buero Vallejo (O'Leary 2005) as well as examining the role of patronage (Hurtley 1986; 1992). More recently, further considerations have also been posited with a view to breaking with the status of censorship in post-Civil War Spain as simply 'antagonista estática' ('static antagonist') (Ruiz Bautista 2005:24). In discussing the treatment of H.G. Wells's texts at the hands of the censorship authorities, Lázaro has spoken of 'the discourse of censorship. By means of illustrations from the decade of the 1940s and drawing principally on literary texts translated from English into Castilian Spanish, the aim of this contribution is to show that no single discourse was at work. On the one hand, the readers/censors were a motley crowd whose ideological leanings held no one sway and their superiors in the National Delegation of Propaganda (Delegación Nacional de Propaganda) might lend themselves to adjustment as a consequence of a wave of realpolitik or by personal persuasion. On the other, texts were appropriated by translators-cum-censors, taking it upon themselves to erase or re-write views considered unacceptable. Thus, novels took on a new life, generated out of diverse discourses, made to the measure of the moment and the manipulating subject.