Translation and Ideological Rewriting in Franco’s Spain: La Faute de l’abbé Mouret de Émile Zola

Abstract

This paper aims to unravel the impact of Francoist censorship in the translation into Spanish of Émile Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret. The novel was published 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. The analysis reveals that Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret was submitted to internal censorship and was published with a number of suppressions and substitutions which did not only transform the novel but also created a discourse favorable to Franco’s interests.