AGAINST SPANISH CONSCIENCE’: THE TRANSLATION OF NORTH-AMERICAN CLASSICS IN POST-WAR SPAIN (1950S & 1960S)

Abstract

The period before the Spanish Civil War witnessed some translations into Catalan of North-American authors such as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is over the 1930s, however, that other big names of North-American literature –such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway- reach high levels of popularity on Spanish soil. What happens much later with the reception of these authors? Our article will explore the translations of these and other North-American authors which appeared over the end of the Spanish Civil War to the end of the 1950s, a period of cnsolidation of the United States as a global economic power. Our proposal is to research the selection of titles edited and translated over these two decades (40s and 50s) with a view of demonstrating that they conform an intricate wave of thought on the part of vocational editors who took care of every single detail in the editing process, and who had to confront serious logistic and ideological problems to boot. In order to carry out our research, we have been working with the catalogues of Janés, Caralt, Seix Barral and Destino.