The Anti-Death League, by Kingsley Amis: A New Perspective on Franco's censorship system

Abstract

This paper aims to unravel the impact of Francoist censorship in the translation into Spanish of Kingsley Amis' The Anti-Death League. The novel was published by Lumen in 1967, immediately after the Press Law of 1966, a time at which the coercive measures adopted certainly encouraged self-censorship by translators, but also by publishers. There is a tendency in the literature to unfairly and systematically attribute any example of self-censorship to translators. In contrast, the present paper provides evidence against this assumption, distinguishing between two types of censorship mechanisms: external censorship, determined by factors other than the translator, and internal censorship, which can be related to the translator‘s creative process. The analysis of The Anti-Death League proposed here reveals that while external censorship refers to institutional measures, internal censorship can be related both to measures adopted by publishers and translators‘ self-censorship.