Rooted in an internationalist ideology and having deployed itself on what was intended as a worldwide scale, Communism has inspired a rich multidisciplinary historiography. By means of state control, nationalisation, planning, ideological constraints and censorship, Communist regimes deeply transformed the functioning of cultural production in the countries where they came to power. They also determined the international circulation of works, favouring it according to political criteria of selection; or on the contrary, curbing or preventing it through various forms of control, when not repression. In addition to which the circulation of works was elaborated as a tool of the Cold War by geopolitical rival camps. Strangely enough, however, translation, one of its main vectors, has for the most part until quite recently been neglected by this historiography. This is all the more true of the practice of interpretation. Studies dealing with the cultural history or with a historical sociology of Communism and the Cold War have only recently been enriched by a reflection on translation, particularly monographs on the subject (Friedberg 1997; Popa 2010). Likewise, in the domain of Translation Studies, collective works on the relations between translation and ideology, power, resistance and activism have only on occasion included case studies (Baer 2010, for example) on this particular socio-historic context (see also Committed approaches and activism). Collective works on censorship through translation have however devoted somewhat more research (Thomson-Wohlgemuth 2007; Špirk 2008; Gallagher 2009; Rădulescu 2010) to this particular period. This subject seems to have inspired the most individual contributions so far.

References

Antochi, Roxana-Mihaela

2012 “Communist ideology and drama translation in Romania.” In Aspects of Literary Translation. Building Linguistic and Cultural Bridge in Past and Present, Eva Parra-Membrives, Miguel Ángel García Peinado & Albrecht Classen (eds), 253–264. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.

Baer, Brian James

2010 “Literary translation and the construction of a Soviet Intelligentsia.” In Translation, Resistance, Activism, Tymoczko Maria (ed.), 149–167. Amherst/Boston: University of Massachusetts Press (previously published in The Massachusetts Review, 2006, 47–3: 537–560).

Baer, Brian James

2011 “Translation theory and Cold War politics. Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov in 1950s America.” In Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts. Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, Brian James Baer (ed.), 171–186. Amsterdam: John Benjamins  TSB.

Dimitriu, Ileana

2006 “‘Symbolic power’ and ‘worldmaking’ in politically over-determined times: Translation and social practice under dictatorship.” In Übersetzen – Translating – Traduire: towards a “Social Turn”?, Michaela Wolf (ed), 57–64. Wien: Lit Verlag.  TSB

Friedberg, Maurice

1997 Literary Translation in Russia: a Cultural History. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State UP.  TSB

Gamsa, Mark

2008 The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies. Leinden: Brill.  TSB

Hsiang-yin Chen, Sasha

2012 “The origin of family, public property and the Communist State: Transmitting and translating Kollontai in the early Soviet Union and May Fourth China.” In China and its Others. Knowledge Transfer through Translation, 1829–2010, James St. André & Hsiao-yen Peng (eds), 189–210. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.

Gallagher, Aoife

2009 “Pasternak’s Hamlet: translation, censorship and indirect communication.” In Translation and Censorship. Patterns of Communication and Interference, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin & David Parris (eds), 119–131. Portland: Four Courts Press.  TSB

Inggs, Judith A

2011 “Censorship and translated children’s literature in the Soviet Union. The Example of the Wizards Oz and Goodwin.” Target 23 (1): 77–89.  TSB

Leighton, Lauren

1991 Two Worlds, One Art: Literary Translation in Russia and America. DeKalb, Illinois: Northen Illinois UP.  TSB

Monticelli, Danièle

2011 “‘Totalitarian translation’ as a means of forced cultural change: The case of postwar soviet Estonia.” In Between Cultures and Texts: Itineraries in Translation History. In Antoine Chalvin, Anne Lange & Danièle Monticelli (eds), 187–200. Bern/Bruxelles: Peter Lang.

Popa, Ioana

2006 “Translation channels. A primer on politicized literary transfert.” Target 18 (2): 205–228.  BoP

Popa, Ioana

2010 Traduire sous contraintes. Littérature et Communisme. Paris: CNRS Editions  TSB

Rădulescu, Anda

2010 “Entre censure et autocensure littéraire en Roumanie: Ľodyssée d’un journal intime à l’époque communiste.” TTR 23 (2): 23–52.  TSB

Safiullina Naiya, Rachel Platonov

2012 “Literary translation and Soviet cultural politics in the 1930s: The role of the journal Internacional’naja literatura.” Russian Literature 72 (2): 239–269.

Sherry, Samantha

2010 “Censorship in translation in the Soviet Union: The manipulative rewriting of Howard Fast’s The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti.” Slavonica 16 (1): 1–14.  TSB

Špirk, Jaroslav

2008 “Translation and censorship in communist Czechoslovakia”. In Translation and Censorship in Different Times and Landscapes, Teresa Seruya & Maria Lin Moniz (eds), 215–228. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.  TSB

Tax-Choldin, Marianna

1986 “The new censorship by translation in the Soviet Union.” The Journal of Library History 21 (2): 334–349.

Thomson-Wohlgemuth, Gaby

2007 “On the other side of the wall. Book production, censorship and translation in eastern Germany.” In Modes of Censorship and Translation: National Contexts and Diverse Media, Francesca Billiani (ed.), 93–116. Manchester: St. Jerome.

Thomson-Wohlgemuth, Gaby

2009 Translation under State Control. Books for Young People in the DDR. London/NY: Routledge.  TSB

Witt, Susanna

2011 “Totalitarianism and translation in USSR”. In Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts. Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, Brian James Baer (ed), 149–170. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.