Alberto Lazaro, ed. The Road from George Orwell: His Achievement and Legacy.(Book Review)

Bern; Peter Lang, 2001. 250 pp. $39.95.

MOST OF US professionally judge other people's writing, either as publishers' consultants, readers or book reviewers for journals, or graders of student papers. But what must it be like to function as a government censor, determining whether someone's writing will ever see publication? "Orwell's Catalonia Revisited: A Politically Incorrect Story," the entry by the editor Alberto Lazaro in his own collection, gives a sense of that in its review of the struggle to get Homage to Catalonia published in Spanish and Catalan translations during the latter years of the Franco regime, a quarter of a century after the book's composition. Official policy required censors to ask of a book, "Does it attack religious beliefs? Morals? The Church or any of its members? The regime or any of its institutions? The people who collaborate or have collaborated with it? Do the censored passages qualify the whole content of the work?" (74). Naturally, applying these standards the censor refused publication when the Barcelona publisher Verrie Editor first applied in 1964. From archival material, Lazaro paraphrases the first refusal letter (75-6). Publishers persisted, promising to alter and expurgate everything to the censor's taste. Finally the firm Ariel of Barcelona got translations into Catalan and Spanish (with introduction by Lionel Trilling) accepted in 1969 and 1970 by dint of accepting very intrusive, damaging censorship. In parallel columns, Lazaro compares in detail "Orwell's Words" and the "Publisher's Version" (84-6). He bitterly laments at the end of the article that many Spanish scholars writing on Orwell still employ this faulty translation, in favor of the much more accurate Catalunya 1937 published in Buenos Aires in 1963. Lazaro points up the irony of this book's publishing history in the land it chronicled: "He who had always fought for the freedom of the press and a truthful representation of history, suffered some decades later the harsh methods of the Spanish censorship, which suppressed and distorted his views on the Spanish Civil War almost beyond recognition" (88-9). …