In this essay, the author aims to indicate some ideological constraints that governed the production and reception of literary translations in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975), that is, to clarify and illustrate the relationship between this regime’s sociocultural values and the foreign literary models that it considered desirable to canonize. The aim is more particularly to provide a clear picture of how this Francoist ‘power behaviour’ was embodied, stressing the key role that translation performed in the creation of its cultural identity.