ABSTRACT
“What translation has in common with censorship”, the Russian exile and poet Joseph Brodsky wrote, “is that both operate on the ‘what’s possible’ principle, and it must be noted that linguistic barriers can be as high as those erected by the state” (Brodsky 1987, 47–48). Who chooses what’s possible, and when, is of current interest in translation studies, which has focused on censorship as a dynamic and dynamically contextual discourse in literary translation. Brodsky (1940–1996) was born during the Second World War and died a few years after the Cold War ended; during his lifetime, literary censorship was most often conceived as a deeply bifurcated narrative positing autocratic regimes (fascist Germany, Italy, Spain and Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe) that banned, imprisoned and killed writers and translators against a free West where the work of persecuted writers could be translated and published. Literary censorship always seemed to happen over there or back then. Brodsky found the narrative to be more complex. A year after his exile to the USA, Brodsky questioned American translators of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry for their slavishness to contemporary American taste, primarily the appetite for free verse over rhymed: “freedom”, he wrote, “turned out to be a burden” (Brodsky 1973, n.p.). Brodsky and his mentor, Akhmatova, were both persecuted and censored in Soviet Russia and Brodsky’s fury at translatorial changes to Akhmatova’s poetry in translation seems disproportionate to the visceral oppression they both endured. However, his experience of both institutional censorship in an autocratic society and his resistance to prevailing tastes in a market-driven democratic society highlights commonalities in the modality of censorship: the mechanisms by which it works, the complex human interactions that support it, how translation makes visible the borders of acceptance in national and ideological narratives, and the role of the translator in supporting and eliding censorship.
