ISSN 2011-799X
Artículo recibido: 06/02/2023
Artículo aceptado: 11/07/2023
doi: 10.17533/udea.mut.v16n2a08(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard
Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish
Daniel Linder
dlinder@usal.es
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5922-1359
Universidad de Salamanca, Spain.
Abstract
Native Son (Harper & Brothers, 1940), by Richard Wright (1908, Roxie, Mississippi–1960, Paris,
France), contained a scene rewritten by the author to satisfy the Book of the Month Club, which had
selected a Black author for the first time. In the censored scene, the main character, Bigger Thomas,
engages in a lewd sexual act; other potentially offensive contents, however, were not subjected to the
same treatment. The first Spanish translation, Sangre negra (Sudamericana, 1941), was banned in
Spain twice (1944 and 1953) when the Argentinian publishers attempted to import it into the strongly
autocratic country ruled by Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975. The translation, by Pedro Lecuo-
na, was finally published in Spain in 1987, under the literal title Hijo nativo (Ediciones Versal and
Círculo de Lectores), with a revised text for the European-Spanish readership. The state censorship
that banned this translation from Spain, the self-censorship that the Argentinian translation contains,
and the Iberian revisions are all examined closely. In 1991, the Library of America published an
uncensored edition which restored the unexpurgated text. However, Lecuona’s (revised) translation
circulated until 2022, when an unexpurgated text, Hijo de esta tierra (Alianza Editorial) by Eduardo
Hojman, was made from the restored text of this hugely significant example of African-American lit-
erature. This edition restores all previously (self)censored segments and also contains the first Spanish
version of the epilogue “How Bigger Was Born”. Book reviews and social media reception pinpoint
the importance of Wright’s contribution but are neglectful of this retranslation’s fascinating history.
Keywords: African-American literature, restoration of literary works, self-censorship, state censor-
ship, Spanish translation
(Auto)censurada en casa y en el extranjero: Native Son (1940) de Richard
Wright en español
Resumen
La novela Native Son (Harper & Brothers, 1940), de Richard Wright (1908, Roxie, Misisipi-1960,
París, Francia), contenía una escena reescrita por el autor para satisfacer al Book of the Month Club,
que había seleccionado por primera vez a un autor negro. En la escena censurada, el protagonista, Big-
ger Thomas, comete un acto sexual lascivo; sin embargo, otros contenidos potencialmente ofensivos no
fueron tratados con la misma rigurosidad. La primera traducción al español, Sangre negra (Sudamerica-
na, 1941), fue prohibida en España en dos ocasiones (1944 y 1953) durante la dictadura autocrática de
Francisco Franco (1939-1975). Esta traducción, de Pedro Lecuona, se publicó por fin en España en
1987, con el título literal Hijo nativo (Ediciones Versal y Círculo de Lectores) y con un texto revisado

Daniel Linder406Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
para lectores ibéricos. Se analiza la censura estatal que prohibió la traducción en España, las autocen-
suras que contiene la traducción argentina y las versiones revisadas publicadas en España. En 1991,
Library of America publicó una edición no censurada en inglés, que restauraba el texto completo. Sin
embargo, la traducción (revisada) de Lecuona circuló hasta 2022, cuando se publicó la primera edi-
ción íntegra en español, Hijo de esta tierra (Alianza Editorial) del traductor Eduardo Hojman, creada
a partir del texto en inglés restaurado de este importante ejemplo de la literatura afroamericana. Esta
edición restaura todos los segmentos anteriormente (auto)censurados y contiene la primera traduc-
ción al español del epílogo “Cómo nació ‘Bigger’”. Las reseñas en prensa y las menciones en redes
sociales señalan la importancia de la contribución cultural inicial de Wright, pero pasan por alto la
fascinante historia de esta retraducción.
Palabras clave: autocensura, censura estatal, literatura afroamericana, restauración de obras litera-
rias, traducción al español
(Auto)censuré chez lui et à l’étranger : Native Son de Richard Wright (1940)
en espagnol
Résumé
Native Son (Harper & Brothers, 1940) de Richard Wright (1908, Roxie, Mississipi-1960, Paris, France)
contenait une scène réécrite par l’auteur lui-même pour complaire le Book of the Month Club qui
avait sélectionné un écrivain noir pour la première fois. Dans la scène censurée, le protagoniste, Big-
ger Thomas, se livre à un acte sexuel obscène ; mais le roman contient d’autres contenus potentielle-
ment choquants qui n’ont pas été traités avec la même rigueur. La première traduction en espagnol,
Sangre negra (Sudamericana, 1941) a été interdite à deux reprises en Espagne (1944 et 1953) lorsque
les éditeurs argentins ont tenté de l’y importer sous le régime autocratique de Francisco Franco (1939-
1975). La traduction de Lecuona a finalement été publiée en 1987 sous le titre littéral Hijo nativo
(Ediciones Versal et Círculo de Lectores) dans une version révisée pour des lecteurs castillans. La
censure d’État dont a été victime le roman, l’autocensure de la traduction argentine et les révisions
pour l’Espagne sont ici toutes étudiées en détail. En 1994, la Library of America a édité le texte non
expurgé, mais la traduction de Lecuona a malgré tout circulé jusqu’en 2022, date à laquelle Eduardo
Hojman a publié Hijo de esta tierra (Alianza Editorial) à partir du texte restauré de cette œuvre signifi-
cative de la littérature afro-américaine. Cette édition rétablit tous les segments précédemment (auto)
censurés et contient également la première version espagnole de l’épilogue « How Bigger Was Born ».
La critique et l’accueil sur les réseaux sociaux soulignent l’importance de la contribution de Wright,
mais négligent généralement l’histoire fascinante de cette retraduction.
Mots clés : autocensure, censure d’État, littérature afro-américaine, restauration d’œuvres littéraires,
traduction espagnole

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish407Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
Introduction
The first uncensored translation of Richard
Wright’s Native Son (Harper & Brothers, 1940)
into Spanish appeared in April 2022 as Hijo de
esta tierra (“Son of this Land,”1 trans. Eduardo
Hojman; Alianza Editorial). A glance back in
time to the first translation in 1941 (Sangre neg-
ra, trans. Pedro Lecuona; Editorial Sudameri-
cana) and a revised edition of this translation
in 1987 (Hijo nativo; Versal Editores/Círculo
de Lectores), reveals a history of translator/
editorial self-censorship and of external, state
censorship. A look back even further reveals
that the source text itself was subjected to ex-
ternal, editorial censorship and self-censorship
by Wright himself: in order to appease the
Book-of-the-Month Club, the Mississippi-born
author agreed to “revise” a sexually explicit
scene that they considered too “raw” (Ramp-
ersad, 1991a, p. 912). In 1991, Wright’s origi-
nal manuscript was restored in the two-volume
Library of America anthology, which Eduardo
Hojman used as his source text. I would like
to explore the complex publication history of
Native Son in Spanish, focusing closely on the
self-censorship in Lecuona’s translation in Ar-
gentina, the failed attempts to obtain official
authorization for importing Sangre negra into
Spain during the Franco era (1944 and 1953),
the eventual publication of Lecuona’s slight-
ly revised, through still self-censored, text in
Spain in 1987, and the unexpurgated and un-
censored translation by Hojman in 2022. This
exploratory study will visit some of the novel’s
most sensitive contents that were susceptible
to (self)censorship, particularly sex-related lan-
guage. The ultimate lesson we learn from this
case study in history may be that, for all the
ambition Wright had to “shock his public” and
“deliver an ideological bomb in case it would
be his last chance to speak out,” censorious
gatekeepers were able to attenuate or eliminate
1 All translations from Spanish into English are
created by the author, who is the sole person res-
ponsible for any errors there may be.
the author’s authentic representation of his
community and lose control of the discourse
used to denounce “the extent of racism and
the hatred it engenders” (Fabre, 1993, pp. 183–
184).
My main objective is to explore the connec-
tions between the novel’s sexually explicit con-
tent and the differing reasons for objecting to
some of that content in the United States and
subsequently in Argentina and Spain, each
country possessing its own complex censor-
ship construct which impressed constraints on
the text. The revisions to the source text were
likely inserted in order to make the text more
marketable, or at least less objectionable, to
the us readership, while the changes to the first
target text were probably enacted in order to
prevent the most objectionable contents (mas-
turbation, infidelity and rape) from raising the
suspicions of vigilant, vindictive censors in Ar-
gentina.
Native Son is a three-part novel that follows the
events in the life of the main character, Big-
ger Thomas, as he accepts a job as a driver for
a wealthy family, kills both the daughter of
the family and his own girlfriend (Book One:
Fear), is apprehended by the police after a
massive pursuit (Book Two: Flight), tried for
his crimes and sentenced to the death penal-
ty (Book Three: Fate). An unlikely represen-
tative of his race and class, Bigger Thomas is
young and poor, uneducated and unscrupu-
lous, and he becomes unrestrained and alien-
ated, though many of the difficult situations
he faces are rooted in the unjust racial and
social discrimination against African Amer-
icans in the United States. Despite criticism
for creating such an unsavory character rather
than a more agreeable representative, Wright
proclaimed that in his first major novel he
intended to “speak his mind” in case he was
never allowed to write another again (Fabre,
1993, p. 174). In the United States, the book
was received positively, though James Baldwin
famously criticized the novel in his 1955 essay

Daniel Linder408Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
“Everybody’s Protest Novel,” deriding the de-
piction of Bigger’s subhuman life, “controlled,
defined by his hatred,” which drove him to
rape, and panning Wright for denying Bigger’s
humanity, the power to fight against “those
brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth” and
ultimately his life (Baldwin, 1955, pp. 22, 23).
In Wright’s epilogue “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.
The Story of Native Son, one of the most signif-
icant novels of our time, and how it came to be
written,” the author described how he “felt a cen-
sor” as he wrote: “Like Bigger himself, I felt a
mental censor — product of the fears which a
Negro feels from living in America — standing
over me, warning me not to write,” imagining
negative reactions from his black audience and
also from potentially reactionary white read-
ers (Wright, 1991a, p. 867). Despite his refusal
to censor all but the most explicit sexual scene,
Wright felt the need to tell it as he saw it: “I knew
that I could not write of Bigger convincingly if I
did not depict him as he was” (Wright, 1991a,
pp. 867–868, emphasis in the original).
Baldwin describes Native Son as a “web of lust
and fury” where “black and white can only thrust
and counter-thrust,” which seems a good lead-in
to discuss the sexual contents of Wright’s novel
and their connection to race relations in the Unit-
ed States in the first half of the twentieth century
(Baldwin, 1955, p. 22). In a New York Times Book
Review article, the author made this connection:
Bigger’s vibrant sexuality had historic signif-
icance. Never before in literature, except in
scurrilous attacks on black men as rapists or
likely rapists, had black male sexuality been
represented with such frankness. Wright
understood that, with few exceptions, there
could be no serious discussion of race in the
United States without reference to sexuality
(…) To nullify Bigger’s sexual drive was to
dilute or even to sabotage the central power
of Native Son as a commentary on race in this
country. (cited in Burks, 2001, p. 1685)
Wright’s inner censor considered how and why
these sexually loaded contents might reinforce
race stereotypes espoused by white people:
“This censor’s warnings were translated into
my own thought processes thus: ‘What will
white people think if I draw the picture of such
a Negro boy? Will they not at once say: ‘See,
didn’t we tell you all along that niggers are like
that?’” (Wright, 1991a, p. 867). Native Son’s
sexual content is often alluded to as the reason
for the novel being challenged in the United
States, particularly in the South. Immediate-
ly after publication, Native Son was banned in
Birmingham, Alabama public libraries (Ramp-
ersad, 1991c, p. 893). All six of the listings on
the American Library Association’s website of
Banned & Challenged Classics mention sex,
sexuality or sexual explicitness or graphicness,
the most recent in a high school library in Fort
Wayne, Indiana, in 19982. Wright’s self-cen-
sorship erased the most objectionable passage
in the source text (male masturbation); howev-
er, enough explicit material survives (fondling
breasts, sexual intercourse) to convey the frank
and authentic black male sexuality that is a
part of who Bigger Thomas is.
A secondary objective is to shed light on the
previously unstudied Lecuona translation in
its original version, hidden from Translation
Studies scholars behind a title change and
the lesser-known process of importation of
translations into Spain, and describe the cur-
rently available translation by Hojman, which
restores previously self-censored fragments
and intensifies one of the novel’s most sensi-
tive scenes. This research effort is timely for
both the source-text and target-text languages
and cultures: the Black Lives Matters move-
ment has emerged and grown in the aftermath
of police brutality in the United States (the
novel describes a Chicago police manhunt for
Bigger Thomas); the Procesos de Memoria, Ver-
dad y Justicia (Memory, Truth and Justice Pro-
cesses) in Argentina are a series of trials for
crimes against humanity committed between
2 See https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/
frequentlychallengedbooks/classics

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish409Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
1976 and 1983; and the Ley de Memoria Históri-
ca (Law of Historic Memory, 2007) in Spain
continues to open spaces of citizen debate and
community action in an attempt to revive and
retain the memory of victims of the autocratic
government, ruled by General Francisco Fran-
co with a National Catholic ideology (1936–
1975), including silenced or muted authors,
translators, editors and other literary actors.
At least four major scholars based in Spain,
Ana María Fraile, María Frías-Rudolphi, Ro-
salía Cornejo Parriego and Isabel Soto, have
studied Wright, his novel Native Son and other
Black American authors and their specific rela-
tionships with Spain. In 2020, Rosalía Cornejo
Parriego published an edited volume entitled
Black usa and Spain: Shared Memories in the 20th
Century (2020), with four chapters focusing on
the Franco period. María Frías’s chapter in
that section looks at Chester Himes, an expa-
triate author and friend of Richard Wright’s in
Paris, and his three lengthy residences in Spain
(2020). Isabel Soto’s chapter in that book ex-
amines “Langston Hughes and the Spanish
‘Context’” (2020); her article “Black Atlantic
(Dis)Entanglements: Langston Hughes, Rich-
ard Wright, and Spain” draws attention to
Richard Wright, who visited the country and
wrote an influential book called Pagan Spain
(1957) (Soto, 2017), which has been translated
three times into Spanish. In 2007, Ana María
Fraile published a monographic collection of
eleven essays on Richard Wright’s Native Son,
which approaches the novel from a wide range
of multidirectional perspectives, including its
critical reception and adaptations of the novel
to other artistic media such as theater, film and
music (Fraile, 2007). However, none of these
major voices in Richard Wright studies has
looked at the into-Spanish translations of his
works nor those of Native Son specifically.
The main body of this article is comprised of
four main parts, i.e., a literature review, the
methodology, the results — subdivided into
five parts, and the conclusions.
1. Contexts and Connections
In this section, I would like to examine the state
of the art regarding research into translations
of Black American Literature (especially into
Spanish), into the (self)censorship of translat-
ed books in Argentina and Spain, and into the
translation of sex-related language (especially
into Spanish). These areas mark three vantage
points from which to examine Wright’s (self)
censored source text and the (self)censored tar-
get texts.
1.1. Research into Translations of Black
American Literature (into Spanish)
I want to examine the loaded, sexually-explicit
content in this novel precisely because it illus-
trates the specific challenges of translating a novel
about race and discrimination from one social
setting to others, i.e., from the United States
to Argentina and Spain, which have different
histories of race and racism. Research into
translations of Black American literature from
English has tended to focus on major figures
such as James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and
Langston Hughes, with recent attention being
paid to the translations of women writers such
as Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston and Al-
ice Walker. Several scholars have studied the
works of Richard Wright in translation, with
particular interest in his French (Fabre, 1997)
and Japanese target texts (Kiuchi & Hakutani,
1997). Cornellà-Detrell has written specifically
on the censorship of James Baldwin’s novels
into Spanish and Catalan (2015), Frías-Rudol-
phi has studied the into-Spanish translation of
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching
God (1996), and Linder has studied the transla-
tion of slang in Chester Himes’s fiction (2014).
The study by Cornellà-Detrell will be used be-
low for its innovative methodology that allows
researchers to detect illegal translations circu-
lating in Spain during the Franco period and
for the data it reveals about publishers in Spain
who brought out works by both Wright and
Baldwin (Wright’s Hijo Nativo and Baldwin’s

Daniel Linder410Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
Ve y dilo en la montaña [Go Tell it on the Moun-
tain] appear in a joint volume by Círculo de
Lectores, 2001). An M. A. dissertation by Car-
la Perissinotto studied three authors, Chester
Himes, Harper Lee and Richard Wright, and
the into-Spanish translations of derogatory
terms used to refer to Black Americans and
other people of color in three novels, including
Native Son (2016).
Vera Kutzinski has studied the specific challeng-
es of translating literature dealing with race and
racism in the United States into a Latin Amer-
ican context where “race” is quite differently
understood. My focus is on the translation of
sex-related language rather than the translation
of race-related terms such as those mentioned
above, and Kutzinski’s study provides analyses
of examples containing sexual references.
1.2. (Self)Censorship of Translated Books
in Argentina and Spain
The first translation of Native Son into Span-
ish was published in Argentina in 1944, then
banned for importation in Spain in 1944 and
1953, both of which occurred during times
when differing censorship constructs were be-
ing used in each country. The period between
1944 and 1959, the year of the eight edition of
Sangre negra —used as the source text for all ref-
erences in the results section below— was marked
by world events that included the aftermath of
the fall of the communist Second Republic in
Spain, the defeat of most fascist regimes in Eu-
rope, the post-wwii reconstruction of Europe
and the beginning of the Cold War. In Argen-
tina, these events brought large numbers of
immigrants from Spain and other European
nations, a rise in nationalism and small-scale
despotism, and eventually the election of Juan
Domingo Perón to the presidency in 1946 (Fer-
reira, 2000, pp. 89, 125). During the mid-to-late
1940s, the national book industry was rapidly
rising and consolidating its importance to the
point that these were considered the “golden
years” (De Sagastizábal, 1995, p. 128).
However, the censorship that in 1976 shack-
led the country’s cultural activity had “grad-
ually and cumulatively” been imposed during
alternating stages of expansion and consol-
idation since the 1950s and 60s, as Andrés
Avellaneda explains in his two-volume classic
study Censura, autoritarismo y cultura: Argentina
1960-1983 (1986, p. 13). While no centralized
authority or policies were ever clearly estab-
lished, the means to enforce censorship were
those of repressive punishments by the gov-
ernment or the military (Avellaneda, 1986,
p. 14). Contents that could become the target
of repressive post-publication censorship were
references to “sexuality, religion and national
security” which went against the grain of the
“Argentinian style of life,” understood to be a
“Catholic/Christian” respect for God, proper-
ty, religion, freedom and family, among others
(Avellaneda, 1986, p. 21). The contents con-
sidered “external and anomalous were, among
others, atheism, antireligious sentiment, an-
tihumanism and materialism” (Avellaneda,
1986, p. 20). Although film and radio were
scrutinized closely, with clear codes of con-
duct, highbrow and lowbrow literature, music
and the arts were also surveilled.
As we shall see below, Pedro Lecuona, transla-
tor of Sangre negra, found a way to self-censor
his translation and avoid a fate similar to what
befell publisher Miguel Losada and translator
Miguel Amibilia in 1961; after translating and
publishing Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, they
were sentenced to one month and six months
in prison, respectively (De Sagastizábal, 1995,
p. 120; Ferreira, 2000, p. 165). In the field of
translation, Falcón has traced the sequestra-
tion of the first Spanish version of Nabokov’s
Lolita in 1958 for its “immoral” content that
could “end up in the hands of children and
adolescents” (Falcón, 2019, p. 86). The crim-
inal charges against the publisher, the printers
and the translator were upheld by the Supreme
Court years later. The kind of censorship
that existed in Argentina during this time, i.e

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish411Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
post-publication censorship, is the predomi-
nant model of censorship deployed in contem-
porary media in the developed world, triggered
by reactionary stakeholders such as cultural,
religious and political groups who use the state
and the media to denounce perceived trans-
gressions against their interests.
In both 1944 and 1953, a representative of Ed-
itorial Sudamericana filed for authorization
for the importation of the self-censored trans-
lation Sangre negra into Spain, but was unsuc-
cessful each time. In fact, as we shall see below,
the reactions of the censors were extremely
harsh. Since the approval of the Ley de Prensa
(Press Law) of 1938, before the Spanish Civil
War had even finished, pre-publication cen-
sorship was mandated for all books within the
conquered territories and later throughout all
of Spain. In 1966 a new law called the Ley de
Prensa e Imprenta (Law of Press and Print)
was enacted, which no longer required censura
previa (prior censorship) but consulta voluntaria
(voluntary consultation), purportedly a more
lenient legal requirement that offered publish-
ers the choice of either making the manda-
tory legal deposit with the Spanish National
Library or requesting voluntary consultation.
However, the consulta voluntaria followed ba-
sically the same process as censura previa and
used a similar reader’s report form.
Both forms asked readers whether the book pre-
sented for censorship attacked religious beliefs,
morals, the Church or any of its members, the
Regime and any of its institutions, or the people
who collaborate or have collaborated with the Re-
gime (Gómez Castro, 2009, p. 134; Rabadán,
2000, pp. 282, 288). The censors, called read-
ers, were prompted to add a personal report
with their observations in the space below the
questions; these reader’s reports constitute the
most valuable sources of information about
the books presented and the reasons for their
authorization, suspension, or other verdicts. In
the 1938–1966 period, many publishers would
present non-translated texts to the censors,
though they often required the into-Spanish
translations for final approval. The publishers
could present either the manuscripts prepared
by translators or the galley proofs, or both.
Not only were all books published in Spain re-
quired to be presented for authorization, but all
books to be imported into Spain were also sub-
ject to this stipulation. Although this process
was essentially the same as the one for books
published nationally in that the readers would
fill out the reports, make their comments and
could mark in red or blue the books presented,
the implications of the verdicts were either au-
thorization or suspension. For books already
printed in foreign countries, the possibility of
suggesting cross-outs and other changes did
not exist.
All of the censorship files are kept in the Archi-
vo General de la Adminstración (aga) in Alcalá de
Henares (Madrid), where they are part of the
Sección de cultura (sc). The trace (translations
and censorship, https://trace.unileon.es/) re-
search group, founded by Raquel Merino and
Rosa Rabadán, and currently led by Camino
Gutiérrez Lanza, uses the tools of Descriptive
Translation Studies and archival research, par-
ticularly to collect information about censored
translations in Spain between 1939 and 1985.3
Both the Argentinian model of post-publica-
tion censorship and the by-gone Spanish mod-
el of pre-publication censorship can condition
new publications by unchaining self-censor-
ship, which is a major focus of this research
effort. Manuel L. Abellán described how
3 A recent article entitled “Archival Research in
Translation and Censorship: Digging into the
‘True Museum of Francoism,’” (Lobejón Santos
et al., 2021) summarizes the group’s history since
1997 and their plans for the future. Currently
underway is an effort to make their various cata-
logues (narrative texts (tracen), poetry (tracep),
theatre plays (tracet), cinema: (tracec) and tele-
vision tracetv) available through the trace db 1.0
database (https://trace.unileon.es/tracebd).

Daniel Linder412Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
government-mandated prior censorship, or vol-
untary consultation, and oppressive models of
post-publication censorship can curtail writers
and translators, forcing them to look for alter-
native avenues of expression yet not allowing
them to express themselves freely:
By self-censorship we understand the preven-
tive measures that, consciously or uncons-
ciously, writers may adopt with the purpose
of avoiding the potentially negative reactions
or rejection that their texts may provoke in all
or some of the groups or bodies of the State
[who are] empowered to impose deletions or
modifications with or without their consent
(2007).
The “groups” Abellán refers to represent cul-
tural, political, religious and societal ideologies
that may cause writers, editors and translators
to attenuate or eliminate sensitive texts or frag-
ments of texts. In a 1974 survey of 95 Span-
ish writers, 37% said they always self-censored
and 31% said they sometimes did (Abellán,
2007). To detect self-censorship in translations,
the published text can be compared side-by-
side to the source text the translator probably
used. However, this time-consuming method
can be refined: Translation Studies researchers
can locate sensitive passages that have content
which may offend empowered cultural, po-
litical, religious and societal groups and then
compare the source text with the published
text in those locations. A Translation Studies
scholar’s familiarity with the source text and
with specialized criticism of these texts can
help locate passages where self-censorship is
likely. In the case of Richard Wright’s Native
Son and its first Spanish translation, Sangre ne-
gra, this is precisely the technique used. Sourc-
es such as Rampersad (1991b, p. 912) discuss
the raw masturbation scene censored in 1940
and restored in 1991, and others such as Keady
(1995, pp. 45–46) discuss the rape scene, pro-
viding excellent clues for where self-censored
passages may be located.
1.3. The Translation of Sex-Related
Language (into Spanish)
Sex-related language varies widely across
Spanish-speaking countries, including between
Argentina and Spain, and the actual effect on
these audiences is difficult to judge. During the
gradually cumulative period of post-publication
censorship in Argentina, immoral sexual con-
tents that were considered alien to the national
style of life were “adultery, abortion, disaffection
between couples and anything that undermines
marriage” (Avellaneda, 1986, p. 20). Cultural
elements that popular media such as the novel
could damage were “the family, patriotic sym-
bols, modesty, religious beliefs, rectitude, hones-
ty, peace and morality” (Avellaneda, 1986, p. 22).
Interestingly, Avellaneda also identifies “famil-
iarity with violence as the only way to achieve
one’s ends, whether they be just or unjust” as
another objectionable topic (Avellaneda, 1986,
p. 25). The first into-Spanish translator, Pedro
Lecuona, self-censored the mention of infidel-
ity and the rape scene, expectedly prompted by
the criteria which precluded adultery and vio-
lence, and if the source text of Native Son had
not been excised of the masturbation scene, he
would likely have censored it himself for being
immodest and immoral.
Fernández Cuesta and Gozalbo Gimeno ex-
amine the censorial practices of the Franco
dictatorship in the media, the arts, the cinema,
the theater and the publishing industry, con-
cluding “There was active control and dom-
inance, both administrative and legal, over
everyone, but also over all artistic, literary, and
even scientific, expressions which proposed
an alternative to established sexual discourse”
(2017, p. 200). These authors enumerate the
kinds of materials that were censored in all
“cultural forms of expression” in 1963:
the justification of suicide, mercy killing,
revenge and bereavement; divorce, adultery,
illicit sexual relations, prostitution, and any-
thing else that would be contrary to marriage

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish413Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
and the family; the presentation of sexual
perversions, drug addiction and alcoholism;
the presentation of crime in a pedagogical
way; the presentation of “images that may
provoke low passions in the normal spectator
and allusions made in such a way as to be
more suggestive than the presentation of the
fact itself ”; images and scenes that offend the
intimacy of conjugal love; images and scenes
of brutality, cruelty and terror presented in a
morbid or unjustified way, etc. (2017, p. 211,
emphasis added).
In the above quote, the prohibitions of a sexual
nature amount to well over half.
José Santaemilia describes sex-related language,
or “the language of sex,” as terms, words, phrases
and expressions that contain references to sexu-
al organs, acts and attitudes that may be used
as profanity, insults, expletives, blasphemous
remarks, informal banter, and so on (Santae-
milia, 2008). He has examined the translation
of explicit language in John Cleland’s Fanny
Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (2005),
the word “fuck” in two Bridget Jones novels
(2008) and the sex-related language in Almud-
ena Grandes’ novel Las edades de Lulú in Eng-
lish (Santaemilia, 2015). His conclusions are
particularly interesting in what they can reveal
about self-censorship and the translator:
Eliminating sexual terms—or qualifying or
attenuating or even intensifying them—in
translation does usually betray the translator’s
personal attitude towards human sexual be-
haviour(s) and their verbalization. The trans-
lator basically transfers into his/her rewriting
the level of acceptability or respectability he/
she accords to certain sex-related words or
phrases. Analyzing the translation of sexual
language into (a) specific language(s) helps
draw the imaginary limits of the translators’
sexual morality and, perhaps, gain insights
into the moral fabric of a specific community
at a specific historical moment (Santaemilia,
2008, pp. 227–228).
The University of Valencia researcher points to
the interesting possibility of using the self-cen-
sored fragments to understand what the trans-
lator’s sexual mores were and/or what the
sexual mores of the surrounding society were.
I feel that when we make such tenuous extrap-
olations, we must do so in the knowledge that
the translators are certainly responsible for the
majority of the texts they translate, but there
are other actors who may also have intervened
in the translated text production process, par-
ticularly the commissioning editor.
2. Methodology
In this section I will describe the materials to be
examined —namely the censored 1940 and the
restored 1991 source texts in English, and
the 1941, 1987 and 2022 target texts in Span-
ish— and the methods used to analyze them.
The first edition of Native Son and all editions
until 1991 contained a sexually-explicit scene
rewritten by the author to satisfy the demands
of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was
considering choosing Wright’s book (Burks,
2001, p. 1684). Editor Edward Aswell wrote to
Wright:
The Book Club wants to know whether, if
they do choose Native Son, you would be will-
ing to make some changes in that scene early
in the book where Bigger and his friends are
sitting in the moving picture theatre. I think
you will recognize the scene I mean and will
understand why the Book Club finds it objec-
tionable. They are not a particularly squea-
mish crowd, but that scene, after all, is a bit
on the raw side. I daresay you could revise
it in a way to suggest what happens rather
than to tell it explicitly. (Rampersad, 1991a,
p. 912).
In that scene, Bigger and his friend Jack mastur-
bate in a public movie theater before the film starts.
They race each other, admiring each other’s
speed in reaching climax, thinking of their girl-
friends, fantasizing about showing their penises
to a woman who has seen them, then ejaculating

Daniel Linder414Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
on the floor and moving to other seats. Below,
we include an extract from the first half of the
masturbation scene. In part 3.4, we will look at
the second half of this scene, the most explicit
and potentially offensive, and how it was trans-
lated into Spanish.
The picture had not yet started and they sat
listening to the pipe organ playing low and
soft. Bigger moved restlessly and his breath
quickened; he looked round the shadows to
see if any attendant was near, then slouched
far down in his seat. He glanced at Jack and
saw that Jack was watching him out of the
corners of his eyes. They both laughed.
“You at it again?” Jack asked.
“I’m polishing my nightstick,” Bigger said.
They giggled.
“I’ll beat you,” Jack said.
“Go to hell.”
The organ played for a long moment on a sin-
gle note, then died away.
“I bet you ain’t even hard yet,” Jack
whispered.
“I´m getting hard.”
“Mine’s like a rod,” Jack said with intense
pride.
“I wished I had Bessie here now,” Bigger
said.
“I could make old Clara moan now.”
“I believe that woman who passed saw us.
“So what?”
“If she comes back I’ll throw it in her.”
“You a killer.”
“If she saw it she’d faint.”
“Or grab it, maybe.”
“Yeah.” (Wright, 1991b, pp. 472-473)
Despite the fact that Aswell asked Wright to
attenuate the scene by making it suggestive
rather than explicit, the above passage (and the
second half, which appears in 3.4 below) was
entirely omitted. The scene was rewritten by
Richard Wright himself in such a way that it
had the same number of lines as the original.
According to Arnold Rampersad, the editor
of the restored the 1991 Library of America
edition, “this may have been done to avoid re-
setting long stretches of type” (1991, p. 912).
However, rather than simply replacing the
scene with another less “objectionable” and
less “raw” one, as the Book-of-the-Month
Club suggested, Wright broadened the amount
of text changed and revised the entire scene,
thus self-censoring his own work. In the orig-
inal scene, Bigger and Jack watch a gossipy
newsreel that also features Mary Dalton’s fam-
ily, her friends and her communist boyfriend,
Jan. In the “drastically altered” scene, Wright
“eliminated all mention of Mary Dalton (who
is featured in the newsreel in the original scene)
and all references to masturbation” (Ramp-
ersad, 1991a, p. 912). Wright’s changes were
accepted, the book was published by Harper &
Bros and recommended as the first-ever Book-
of-the-Month Club choice by a Black author.
Almost immediately after the book came out
in English, a Spanish version, entitled Sangre
negra [Black Blood] was published by Editorial
Sudamericana (Buenos Aires) in 1941. As we
shall see below, the translator, Pedro Lecuona,
crafted a Spanish text that was acclaimed for
its overall quality (Mutis, 2000b, 2000a), but
which also contained passages that were omit-
ted or rewritten. Because the censored scene
published in the 1940 source text contained
no references to any objectionable material,
there is no need to examine and analyze ex-
amples from this part of Lecuona’s translation.
However, the omitted and rewritten passages
in which Bigger Thomas fondles his girlfriend
Bessie Mears (see Example 1) and later rapes
and murders her (see Example 3) need to be
examined closely. In my view, these textual
changes in the first Spanish target text are de-
liberate attempts to avoid offending the read-
ers by exposing them to explicit descriptions
of sexual conduct. Even though the transla-
tor may not be the sole person responsible for
omissions, as these could be attributed to con-
sultants, editors and copyeditors, among oth-
ers, the translator is certainly responsible for
the lengthy rewritten passages.

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish415Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
Despite the censorship in English and the
self-censorship in Spanish, Lecuona’s trans-
lation was banned in Spain twice. In 1944,
shortly after its original publication, Edito-
rial Sudamericana filed for authorization to
import Sangre negra, presenting a recently
published copy of the novel. However, it was
suspended, with the censor reporting that it
contained explicit references to sex and to
communism that were intolerable in Spain
(see 3.2 below). In 1953, the Argentinian pub-
lisher wanted to make the book available more
widely in Spanish-speaking countries near the
time when the first movie adaptation (Esclavos del
miedo, Dir. Pierre Chenal, 1951; see The Spanish
Film Catalogue, Ministry of Culture and Sport,
Government of Spain) came out. However, Edi-
torial Sudamericana’s appeal met with the same
fate: the second censor reported that the nov-
el continued to attack the principles held by
the regime, particularly the National Catholic
morals and political ideals of the post-Civil-
War dictatorship.
In 1987, Lecuona’s translation was finally pub-
lished in Spain, though it had two major alter-
ations: the title was changed to the literal Hijo
nativo, causing the impression it was a new trans-
lation and removing the explicit reference to
race, and the text was revised in such a way
that it no longer had any Latin Americanisms
nor Argentinisms but only European Spanish
lexis and idioms, further reinforcing the idea
that the translation was fresh when it was ac-
tually 48 years old. None of the segments were
restored in any way and it is unlikely that the un-
credited revisor looked at the source text at all.
Hojman’s translation drew from the 1991 Li-
brary of America edition, which was billed
as an “unexpurgated edition” (Rampersad,
1991a, p. 913). The segments rewritten by
Wright and published in the March 1940
first edition appear in the “Notes” section of
the edition restored by Rampersad (1991b,
pp. 924–928). As we shall see in section 3.4,
Hojman even intensifies aspects of the “movie
masturbation” scene.
3. Results
My observations will bring to light previously
unstudied censored texts and the lesser-known
process of importation of translations into
Spain during Francoism, and it will contribute
new data, especially on (self-)censored trans-
lations.
3.1. Self-Censored: The First Spanish
Translation, (1941)
The first Spanish version, entitled Sangre ne-
gra [Black Blood] (Sudamericana, 1941), was
translated by Pedro Lecuona and appeared in
the Horizonte collection. Sudamericana was
one of the “big three” publishers in Argenti-
na, along with Emecé and Losada, the latter
of which Lecuona also translated for (Loedel
Rois, 2018). The Horizonte collection sought
to publish first-time translations into Spanish
sourced from a wide range of foreign litera-
tures and artistic sensitivities (Loedel Rois,
2018). In addition to authors such as Thomas
Mann, André Malraux, Hermann Hesse, Ald-
ous Huxley, Sommerset Maugham, and John
Dos Passos, Richard Wright was considered
a top figure in the collection. Pedro Lecuona
Ibarzábal (Elgoibar, Spain, 1897–1955) was
a consul for the Second Republic of Spain
[1932–1939], stationed first in La Plata, Argen-
tina, then in Bayonne and later in Bordeaux,
France, and lastly in Washington, dc Appar-
ently, he traveled directly from Washington to
Buenos Aires, Argentina, after the Nationalist
forces ended the Spanish Civil War in 1939.
According to the entry for this translator in the
Elgoibar 1936 Memoria Historikoa website, the
victorious, right-wing nationalist government,
in absentia, sentenced Lecuona to five years
of disqualification to act as a diplomat and a
fine of 25 000 pesetas. He spent the last fifteen
years of his life exiled in Buenos Aires4.
4 See https://elgoibar1936.info/
pedro-lecuona-ibarzabal

Daniel Linder416Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
In the country where he found asylum, Lec-
uona used his language skills, particularly his
English competence, to secure employment as
a translator and contribute to the rising publish-
ing industry led by Buenos Aires-based giants
Losada, Sudamericana and Emecé. Willson
might have described him as a “translator-gen-
tleman” (a politician from a traditional back-
ground whose life experiences had exposed him
to foreign languages) who became a “transla-
tor-translator” (a professionalized, less visible,
figure distinct from a “translator-writer”, whose
careers as authors often made them prominent
public personalities) (2011, p. 151). Part of this
rise was due to publishing companies from
Spain that had moved their operations to Ar-
gentina either during or immediately after
the civil war. Loedel Rois sums up the exiled
Basque translator’s contribution to the Argen-
tinian canon in this way:
Through Lecuona, the American novel man-
aged to carve out a niche for itself in a genre
dominated up to that point by European
authors. His versions of Sangre negra [1941]
(Native Son), by Richard Wright; La luna se
ha puesto [1942] (The Moon is Down), by John
Steinbeck; and Tener y no tener [1959] (To
Have and Have Not), by Ernest Hemingway,
were published in the Horizonte collection.
He also translated the British Mary Webb,
Siete para un secreto [1947] (Seven for a Secret)
and Ponzoña mortal [1944] (Precious Bane);
Margaret Kennedy, La ninfa constante [1941]
(The Constant Nymph) and El tonto de la familia
[1945] (The Fool of the Family); and Richard
Llewellyn, Cuán verde era mi valle [1942] (How
Green was my Valley); or the Russian Nina Fe-
dorova, whose novel La familia [1952] (The
Family) had been a real bestseller in the Unit-
ed States. (2018, p. 115)
The quality of Lecuona’s translation of Faulk-
ner’s Light in August (Luz de agosto), published
one year after Wright’s Sangre negra, deserved
some praise from the Colombian writer Álvaro
Mutis: “Faulkner’s style, which is so difficult
to capture, even in his own language, pres-
ents insurmountable difficulties in translation,
despite which the present European Spanish
version, by Pedro Lecuona, is the best of the
very few Faulkner translations in Spanish,
without much loss of intensity and freshness”
(2000a, p. 15).
I would like to lead this discussion towards the
variety of Spanish that the author uses, an issue
which Salamanca Zamora mentions briefly, and
ultimately towards a discussion of the self-cen-
sored passages in the translation that make this
work uniquely characteristic of this translator.
Salamanca Zamora points out how Lecuona
mostly used Peninsular Spanish expressions in
his rendition of Luz de agosto (Light in August)
in 1942 for Editorial Sur, many of which were
regional or local:
In his version of Faulkner, Lecuona used
some Argentinisms (galpón for ‘shed’, nafta
for ‘gasoline’ and some others), but, in gen-
eral, he made use of terms and expressions
from peninsular Spanish to such an extent that
in a review of the second edition of Faulkner’s
Santuario [Sanctuary] published in the Revista
de Indias de Bogotá (85, 1946), the Colombi-
an writer Álvaro Mutis stated that Lecuona’s
translation [of Luz de agosto]5 was «very much
marred by the provincial and local turns of
phrase that the translator uses too often.» (85,
1946) (2012, p. 246)
In the first pages of the book, there is evidence
of what Salamanca Zamora affirms, as there are
“some Argentinisims” such as “departamen-
tito” (p. 12) instead of “apartamento” (apart-
ment), “tacho de la basura” (p. 17) instead of
“cubo de la basura” (garbage can), and “ator-
rante” (p. 19) instead of “vago” (lazy). Lecuona
had only moved to Argentina a few years be-
fore, so used mostly lexis, idioms and syntax
5 The subject of the review in which this quote
appears is William Faulkner’s Sanctuary translated
into Spanish by Lino Novás Calvo, who titled it
Santuario (Mutis, 2000b, p. 19). The added seg-
ment in brackets makes it clear that Mutis was
talking about Lecuona’s translation of Light in
August, not Sanctuary.

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish417Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
typical of peninsular Spanish, though there may
be some which are “too regional and local.”6
Self-censorship of sexually-explicit language
also occurs, with Lecuona omitting or at-
tenuating key words and rewriting passages.
Bigger Thomas is described as touching Mary
Dalton’s and Bessie Mears’ breasts, and other
words such as waist, soft, hands, and kiss/kissing
are repeated in each passage. I believe Wright
used these repetitions to create an interesting
co-textual relationship between both passages.
For ease of comparison, the two first exam-
ples refer to Mary and the second two refer to
Bessie. However, Lecuona self-censors Bigger
Thomas’s recollection of how he had touched
Mary’s breasts while touching Bessie’s. The
6 Pagni compares a 1941 into-Spanish translation
by the “recently exiled” Spanish author Francisco
Ayala with another by a native Argentinian trans-
lator, Xul Solar, and concludes that they are sig-
nificantly different, with Ayala’s being much more
“classic” and Xul Solar’s much more “experimen-
tal” with the local variety of the language (Pagni,
2014, p. 119).
self-censored portion is highlighted in both col-
umns (Example 1).
In Example 1, Lecuona does not shy away
from the explicit references to Bigger’s hands
or fingers upon Mary’s breasts (mentioned
three times), but he does omit the line in which
Bigger thinks about that while fondling his
girlfriend. In place of that omission, the Span-
ish reader finds no impurity of thought: “Full
of desire, he leaned over her, brought his face
close to hers and kissed her”.
Another one of the instances of self-censorship
occurs in the scene in Book 2: Flight, where
Bigger Thomas rapes his girlfriend Bessie
Mears immediately before killing her. Bigger
does not speak, but his actions are described.
Bessie’s oppositional exclamations to Bigger’s
violent actions punctuate each step in the se-
quence. Bigger becomes sexually aroused (“a
huge warm pole of desire rose in him”) and
hugs and kisses Bessie violently (“kissing her
again, hard and long”); then, he deliberate-
ly touches her sexual organs outside (“warm
flesh”) and inside (“still warmer and softer
Native Son (1941) Sangre negra (Trans. Lecuona, 1941)
…his hand circling her waist and the tips of his fingers
feeling the soft swelling of her breasts. (Wright, 1991b,
p. 522)
Le había echado el brazo por la cintura y sentía con
la punta de los dedos la suave coma de sus pechos.
(Wright, 1987, p. 120)
…he leaned over her, excited, looking at her face
in the dim light, not wanting to take his hands from
her breasts. She tossed and mumbled sleepily. He
tightened his fingers on her breasts, kissing her again,
feeling her move toward him. (Wright, 1991b, p. 524)
…se inclinó sobre ella mirándole a la cara en la tenue
claridad y sin querer retirar las manos de los pechos
de Mary, quien se agitaba y murmuraba soñolienta.
Bigger apretó los dedos contra los pechos de Mary, la
besó de nuevo y sintió que se movía hacia él. (Wright,
1987, p. 122)
…his arm about her waist felt her body relax into a
softness he knew and wanted. She rested her head on
the pillow… (Wright, 1991b, p. 569)
Finalmente, el brazo de Bigger, que la rodeaba por
el talle, sintió que el cuerpo de Bessie adquiría la
blandura que conocía y deseaba. Bessie reclinó la
cabeza en la almohada. (Wright, 1987, p. 189)
He placed his hands on her breasts just as he had
placed them on Mary’s last night and he was thinking
of that while he kissed her. (Wright, 1991b, p. 569)
Lleno de deseo, se inclinó sobre ella, le acercó la cara
y la besó. (Wright, 1987, p. 189)
Example 1. Translation by Lecuona (1941) in which Bigger Thomas’s Thoughts of Mary Dalton While
Touching Bessies Mears Are Self-Censored

Daniel Linder418Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
flesh”) with his “icy fingers”. These instanc-
es are highlighted in the source text column
of Example 2. In the Spanish text, however,
Bigger’s “desire” (no pole is mentioned) causes
him to hug and kiss her “passionately” (with
no mention of the uncomfortable violence and
length), then to continue to hug and kiss her
passionately and uncontrollably (“swept by a
violent gust of passion”) despite her protests.
These are highlighted in the target text column
of Example 2.
Also self-censored from the Spanish text are
the references to how cold and icy Bigger’s fin-
gers were and how uncomfortable this must
have been for Bessie when he “touched inside
her.” Instead of being shown Bigger’s abusive
cold-handed groping, the Spanish text replac-
es “his icy fingers touched inside of her” with
“Bigger kissed her again”. Despite Lecuona’s
self-censorship, he adds to the Spanish text sev-
eral adjectives that underline Bessie’s distress
(inerte=inert, resignación=resignation, apremian-
te=urgent); the source text in English does not
contain any form of these words. While the
Spanish text attenuates Bigger’s actions and
attributes them to his “passion,” it does addi-
tionally recognize that Bigger’s “passion” was
“violent.”
In the final part of the sequence, Bigger Thom-
as forcefully penetrates Bessie and climaxes,
ignoring her protests though feeling remorseful
during the act. In the English text, the rape oc-
curs after the narrator’s voice states, “His desire
was naked and hot in his hand and his fingers
were touching her,” a fragment which is com-
pletely omitted in Spanish. The source text
implies, rather that states explicitly, the forced
intercourse through lexical repetition (had to,
help it, should, look) and it also implies Bigger’s
climax through specific word choices (now,
all). However, the Spanish reader is exposed
to a completely different description: Bigger
metaphorically mounts Bessie compassionate-
ly, like a horseman racing downhill against the
wind, then he falls off his mount, exhausted.
A back translation into English is provided in
the third column of Example 3 for the sake of
readers who may not understand Spanish and
therefore the large degree of self-censorship in-
stigated by Lecuona.
Example 2. Self-Censored Translation of Sex-Related Language in Lecuona (1941)
Native Son (1940) Sangre negra (1941)
A huge warm pole of desire rose in him, insistent and
demanding; he let his hand slide from her shoulder to
her breasts, feeling one, then the other; he slipped his
other arm beneath her head, kissing her again, hard
and long.
“Please Bigger…” (Wright, 1991b, p. 663)
Se le despertó un deseo enorme e insistente, le
deslizó la mano izquierda del hombro al seno, y le
acarició primero un pecho y luego el otro; le había
puesto el otro brazo debajo de la cabeza y le besó
apasionadamente.
—Bigger, por favor. (Wright, 1959, pp. 319–320)
Her head lay limp in the crook of his arm and his hand
reached for the hem of her dress, caught it in his fingers
and gathered it up slowly. His cold fingers touched her
warm flesh and sought still warmer and softer flesh.
Bessie was still, unresisting, without response. His icy
fingers touched inside of her and at once she spoke,
not a word, but a sound that gave forth a meaning of
horror accepted. Her breath went out of her lungs in
long soft gasps that turned into a whisper of pleading.
“Bigger…Don’t!” (Wright, 1991b, p. 664)
La cabeza de Bessie yacía en el ángulo del brazo de
Bigger, quien alargó la mano al borde del vestido,
lo agarró y empezó a levantárselo lentamente.
Arrastrado por un violento soplo de pasión, la
estrechó en brazos. Bessie estaba quieta, inerte; no
se resistía, pero tampoco respondía. Bigger la besó
de nuevo y ella respondió, no con palabras, sino con
un prolongado sonido de resignación que expresaba
la aceptación del horror. El aire le salía y entraba en
los pulmones en unos suspiros entrecortados que se
convirtieron finalmente en apremiante murmullo de
súplica.
— Bigger…no. (Wright, 1959, p. 320)

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish419Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
In the heavily altered Spanish text, which we
attribute to self-censorship, the reader is not told
of Bigger’s remorse, as the words and expres-
sions could not help it, sorry and feeling bad are all
stricken from the text. Nor is the reader cued
into the moment of Bigger’s climax with sex-
ually insinuating language, as the English text
does (“heard his own breath going and coming
heavily”); the inverted syntax of the expression
“going and coming,” most often appearing as
“coming and going,” draws the reader’s atten-
tion to the significance of this inversion. How-
ever, the Spanish text does cast into words some
of the violence of the attack, as it uses words
such as “impelled,” “frenetic” and “force.” Be-
cause of Lecuona’s self-censorship, this entire
morally objectionable scene went unnoticed by
the censors in Spain, while the two other scenes
described in Example 1 above did draw their
attention. For comparison with the uncensored
2022 Hojman translation, see section 3.4.
3.2. Banned in Spain: The First Spanish
Translation, Sangre negra (1944, 1953)
Pedro Lecuona’s into-Spanish translation was
banned in Spain twice (1944 and on appeal in
1953) after the prestigious Argentinian pub-
lisher Editorial Sudamericana attempted to
import it into Spain during the earliest and
harshest years of the Franco dictatorship. At
the time, the 1938 Press Law, passed during
the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), required
all books to be presented to censors for author-
ization prior to publication.
Sudamericana’s application was suspended on
October 7, 1944, because reader number 17 felt
that it “attacked the [Catholic] Dogma or Moral
standards” and “the institutions of the Regime,”
in the form of “scenes of the crudest sexual re-
alism” and “indirect attacks on religious princi-
ples” (aga, sc, box N° 21/07487, file N° 5403).7
All of the above quotes in the reader’s report
are underlined in red. The censor pointed spe-
cifically to pages 110, 118,8 189, 480 and “the
7 The files are kept in boxes, where each file is in-
serted into a labeled envelope. The naming con-
vention used here identifies the location of the
files, in the aga, the collection that they belong to,
the sc, followed by the box number and the file
number.
8 The censor refers to page 118 “y ss,” which
means “and the following pages.” This same
Example 3. Self-Censored Translation by Lecuona (1941) of the Scene in Which Bigger Thomas Rapes
Bessie Mears
Native Son (1940) Sangre negra (1941) Back-translation
He had to now Yes. His desire was
naked and hot in his hand and
his fingers were touching her. Yes
Bessie. Now. He had to now. don’t
Bigger don’t He was sorry, but he
had to. He. He could not help it.
Help it. Sorry. Help it. Sorry. Help it.
Sorry. Help it now. She should Look!
She should should should look. Look
at how he was. He. He was. He was
feeling bad about how she would
feel but he could not help it now.
Feeling. Bessie. Now. All. He heard
her breathing heavily and heard
his own breath going and coming
heavily. Bigger Now. All. All. Now.
All. Bigger… (Wright, 1991b, p. 664)
Pero ahora tenía que prestársela.
Impulsado imperiosamente, saltó
por encima de sus quejumbrosas
protestas y, sintiendo una gran
compasión por ella, galopó en
un caballo frenético por una
pendiente cuesta abajo frente
a un viento en contra. No, no,
no, Bigger. Y el viento adquirió tal
fuerza que lo levantó; y sobre el
gemido del viento oyó vagamente:
no, Bigger, no. En un momento del
que no se acordaba, había caído;
y yacía extenuado, con los labios
entreabiertos. (Wright, 1959, p. 321)
But now he had to pay attention
to it. Overpoweringly impelled, he
leaped over her pitiful protests and,
feeling great compassion for her,
galloped on a frantic horse down
a steep hill with the wind against
him. No, no, no, Bigger. And the
wind blew so strong that it lifted
him, and above the moaning he
heard faintly: no, Bigger, no. With
no memory of when, he had fallen
and lay exhausted, with his lips
parted.

Daniel Linder420Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
final pages of the book,” which contain sexually
explicit references (pp. 118, 189) and references
to communism (p. 110), religion (p. 480) and
the class struggle (pp. 565–567). As we have
seen above, the reader does not mention the
rape scene beginning on page 319, because
Lecuona’s self-censorship hid the sexual ex-
plicitness of the source text. The reader not
only proposed suspension but harsher con-
demnation, stating “In my judgement, this is
not only a case of clear suspension, but it indi-
cates either bad faith or irresponsibility on the
part of the publisher who I believe should be
rebuked” (aga , sc, box N° 21/07487, file N°
5403). This recommendation is doubly under-
lined in red. There is no evidence that the Dele-
gado nacional de propaganda (National Delegate
for Propaganda), who signed the refusal, took
any steps in this direction, perhaps because this
was a foreign publisher. For publishers based in
Spain, there could have been extremely serious
consequences, the most drastic of which could
have been a complete stripping of their authori-
zation to publish (Álvarez Maylín, 2020).
On January 22, 1953, Sudamericana appealed
against the decision and requested a review
“alleging that the film based on the novel
will soon be shown in Spain” (aga , sc, box
N° 21/07487, file N° 5403). After a re-exam-
ination of the novel and the file, however, the
Director general de información (General Direc-
tor for Information) denied the appeal and
considered the resolution definitive: “having
examined the allegations and the new report,
this file is declared closed and the previous cri-
teria are upheld” (aga , sc, box N° 21/07487,
file N° 5403). The reader’s report signed by
name (Leopoldo) rather than number, though
the surname is illegible, is unremarkable, ex-
cept for the double-underlined judgment that
“[The book] should not be authorized.”
abbreviation is used after the mention of pages
189 and 480. It is unclear exactly how many sub-
sequent pages the censor refers to.
Despite the ban on importation into Spain, this
book certainly circulated illegally. I agree with
Cornellà-Detrell that when there are no files in
the aga for a particular book, or, as in this case,
when a book did not obtain authorization, plus
when there is no copy of it in the Spanish Na-
tional Library, where a mandatory copy of ev-
ery book published in Spain must be sent (this
is called “depósito legal,” or legal deposit), yet
there are copies of the book available through
second-hand booksellers located in Spain, “this
certainly indicates that a considerable number
of [these books] entered the country surrepti-
tiously, though it is difficult to determine how
many or when” (2015, p. 43)9. However, Cor-
nellà-Detrell provides ample testimony of the
existence of secret rooms in bookshops where
banned books could be purchased by trusted
private readers (Cornellà-Detrell, 2021). After
the transition to democracy, these surreptitious-
ly acquired books could be sold freely to sec-
ond-hand booksellers who could resell them
without any restrictions. A much less likely
scenario, in my view, is that these books ar-
rived from Argentina after the demise of Fran-
co-era censorship and more than twenty years
after their original publication. Their value for
consumers in Spain would have been at their
peak during their prohibition. A search in the
second-hand booksellers Iberlibro and todo-
coleccion.net will also be used to gather infor-
mation about the commercial circulation of
Lecuona’s translation which finally appeared
9 I purchased a copy of the eight edition (August,
1959) from Iberlibro, a Spanish bookseller associa-
ted with abe Books, in November 2021, and at the
time of this writing (November 4, 2022) there were
two copies available (a first-edition hard cover in
Madrid, and a second or third edition paperback
near Valencia). The online second-hand bookseller
todocolección.net had four additional copies for
sale, with two different hard cover presentations
near Barcelona and two soft cover editions in Gali-
cia and the Basque Country. It is impossible to state
with absolute certainty that these specific books
were held in private libraries in Spain then became
available to second-hand booksellers.

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish421Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
in Spain in 1987, though it was revised for
standard European Spanish readers.
3.3. Still Self-Censored: Hijo nativo (Lecuona)
Revised for Publication in Spain (1987)
Lecuona’s translation was finally published in
Spain in 1987, under the literal title Hijo nati-
vo (Ediciones Versal and Círculo de Lectores)
and with a revised text for the Castillian-Span-
ish readership. The state censorship that banned
this translation in 1944 and 1953 had been abol-
ished, not in 1975 with the death of the dic-
tator, but in 1978 with the ratification of the
Constitution which guaranteed freedom of
speech; a later Constitutional Court ruling
in 1983 declared that it was so (Vila-Sanjuan,
2003, p. 68), though some censorship con-
structs remained in place until 1985 (Rabadán,
2000). However, the self-censorship in the Ar-
gentinian translation remained; the revision
was limited to modifying all Latin American-
isms or Argentinisms. So “departamentito de
una sola pieza” became “habitación” (room,
p. 1210), “tacho de la basura” became “cubo
de la basura” (trash can, p. 15) “atorran-
te” became “vago” (lazy, p. 16). The reviser
probably did not look at the source text at all.
No examples from this revised translation are
provided in this section because the changes
are mostly on the word level rather the phrase,
sentence or paragraph level.
The revised translation was published by Edi-
ciones Versal (Barcelona) and licensed to Cír-
culo de Lectores (Barcelona) in the same year,
1987. The collection in which it appeared, La
Biblioteca del Corondel, was active between
1985 to 1988, launching 31 titles, all transla-
tions, mostly from English; nine volumes were
published in 1987. Several authors had multiple
books in the collection; there were five titles by
Lawrence Durrell, three by Nadine Gordimer,
two by Joseph Brodsky, and two by Jean-Marie
10 All page numbers for the revised Lecuona translation
are from the Ediciones Versal (1987) edition only.
Gustave Le Clézio. This was a collection of lit-
erary translations (corondel means column-rule,
i.e., a thin, vertical line separating columns of
type) of major authors, occasionally represent-
ed by lesser works (Philip Roth’s The Anatomy
Lesson; D. H. Lawrence’s Mr. Noon; Vladimir
Nabokov’s Transparent Things). Many were
first translations, such as the five volumes of
Lawrence Durrell’s The Avignon Quintet. The
Spanish translation of James Baldwin’s If
Beale Street Could Talk, also a first translation,
was published in the same year as Hijo nativo.
Círculo de Lectores was a home book club
owned by Bertelsman which had its own distri-
bution system in Spain comprised of a network
of sales agent who delivered the catalogue and
books to members door to door (Jimeno Revil-
la, 2022, p. 1). The double availability of this
book broadened the range of potential read-
ers to include both members of the club (who
could buy the exclusively available Círculo edi-
tion) and customers in bookshops (who could
buy the Versal edition unrestrictedly). In the
late 1980s, the club had diversified beyond
bestsellers to include “a combination of com-
mercially successful titles alongside the pub-
lication of prestigious works and authors” as
well as “carefully designed editions, not only
in terms of contents (prologues and critical
studies by experts) but also format (high-qual-
ity materials, illustrated editions) (Jimeno
Revilla, 2022, pp. 1–2). Around this time, the
club’s cultural dissemination project reached a
peak of 1.5 million members (Jimeno Revilla,
2022, p. 2). Círculo de Lectores credits Versal
on the copyright page as the rights holder and
themselves as the licensee.
We have described these two publishers and
their collections in an attempt to discover why
the editors chose to re-release the translation
of Native Son and why they chose 1987 as the
year to do it. The restored version in English
appeared in 1991 and made theirs obsolete very
soon after publishing it, so there does not seem
to have been any or much communication

Daniel Linder422Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
with Wright’s literary heirs who might have
forewarned them. The picture that emerges is
that of a high-volume literary collection (Ver-
sal’s Biblioteca del Corondel) and of a home
book club during a commercially and cultur-
ally successful period (Círculo de Lectores)
seeking out new material that could be turned
around quickly, and a revised translation
could certainly be produced faster than a new
translation. Though Pedro Lecuona is credit-
ed on the copyright page of both, there is no
mention that the text is a revision nor of the
reviser’s name. Neither edition credits Edi-
torial Sudamericana, but both credit “Ellen
Wright, 1968.” Richard Wright’s wife and lit-
erary heir may have sold the translation rights
to Versal, thinking they were going to prepare
a new translation. The title change may im-
ply that this is either a first or new translation,
because the previous translation’s title, Sangre
negra, is difficult for readers, critics and even
scholars to associate with Wright’s title, Native
Son, even though the words in the first Span-
ish title have the virtue of telegraphing that the
book is about race and violence very effectively.
Perissinotto for example, did not discuss this
translation, despite having conducted research
in the aga (2016). There is no record of this
translation in the National Library of the Re-
public of Argentina nor in the National Library
of Mexico, and there is no evidence on Iberli-
bros nor todocolección.net that this book ever
circulated in Argentina, Mexico or other Latin
American countries; all booksellers offering Hijo
nativo (1987) are located in Spain only. This may
be an indicator that Ediciones Versal had exclu-
sive rights to publish in Spain only or that this
was done to prevent any conflict with Editorial
Sudamericana, which still operates today as a
Penguin Random House company.
However, Lecuona’s (revised) translation was
the only one circulating until 2022, when an
unexpurgated text was made from the restored
manuscript (see section 2 above) of this signif-
icant example of African American literature.
3.4. An Uncensored Retranslation: Hijo
de esta tierra (2022), by Eduardo Hojman
In April 2022, Hijo de esta tierra, a translation by
Eduardo Hojman, was published by Alianza
Editorial (Madrid) within its collection Alian-
za Literaturas (Alianza Lit.). This translation
marks the first unexpurgated, uncensored ver-
sion to be published in Spanish; the edition also
contains the first Spanish translation of Wright’s
epilogue “How Bigger Was Born.” We will ex-
amine relevant details about how Alianza Edito-
rial chose this moment to publish the translation
and how the translated text restores the previ-
ously self-censored segments.11
Marta Barrio García-Agulló (New Haven,
Connecticut, 1986) described how in the after-
math of the video recorded murder of George
Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the
subsequent riots around the Third Precinct
headquarters coupled with the rise of the
Black Lives Matter movement, Alianza want-
ed to publish a “contemporary classic” of Af-
rican American literature. Richard Wright’s
Native Son was just such a novel, as it is often
required reading in us colleges and universi-
ties. She appreciated the work for its “political
incorrectness” and the determinism of Bigger
Thomas as a protagonist; she compares the
work with other “contemporary classics” by
Victor Hugo and Emile Zola.
With a new translation, Alianza wanted to
“dress it up again” and “give it a makeover”;
they also sought to reflect the translation’s
newness by slightly changing the title. Edu-
ardo Hojman, “a fantastic translator who I
have worked with for many years,” was cho-
sen for the task, in part because “he needs no
11 The main sources of information are the transla-
tor Eduard Hojman and the Alianza editor Marta
Barrio, with whom I conducted unrecorded te-
lephone interviews on February 1 and 2, 2023,
respectively. Supplementary sources include in-
formation available online about Alianza, Alianza
Literaturas, Eduardo Hojman and Marta Barrio.

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish423Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
orders nor suggestions” to get the job done. Al-
though their collaboration on this translation
was rather routine, it was a “thrilling project
that we thoroughly enjoyed,” particularly the
choice of the cover image featuring an actor
from the theatrical version of Native Son. Ac-
cording to Barrio, the sexually explicit scenes
in the restored novel are not something that
a contemporary reader or editor would have
any trouble with, given the explicit content in
many novels and translations published today.
The novel was well received by the press, al-
though none of the reviews ever mentioned the
quality of the translation, and its sales figures
were good, although she stressed that the main
objective of Alianza Editorial is to offer quali-
ty, not necessarily bestsellers. Indeed, the book
reviews in national newspapers (by José María
Guelbenzu in El País; by Federico Aguilar in
El Imparcial; by Sergi Sánchez in El Periódico de
España; by José Antonio Gurpegui in El Es-
pañol, among others) pinpoint the importance
of Wright’s contribution but are neglectful of
this retranslation’s fascinating history and the
quality of the Spanish translation.
Eduardo Hojman (Buenos Aires, 1964) also
stresses that his relationship with Alianza Ed-
itorial goes back many years, although he has
also translated for other publishers such as
Ediciones B, Emecé, Malpaso, Navona, Plane-
ta, rba, Roca, Salamandra, Taurus, all located
in Barcelona, and Debate, located in Madrid.
Hojman described Alianza Editorial as a brave
publisher, especially since in 2020 they commis-
sioned him to translate Woody Allen’s Apropos
of Nothing [A propósito de nada] at a time when
Hachette in the United States had refused to
publish it. He described Native Son as a “novel of
ideas,” though he is critical of the novel’s third
part, Fate, which rather ploddingly describes the
trial and Bigger Thomas’s uncharacteristic con-
versations with his lawyer, Boris Max.
Despite speaking with a distinctive Argentin-
ian accent, Eduardo Hojman uses standard
European Spanish lexis in his translations
of “one-room apartment” (“diminuto apar-
tamento,” p. 14), “garbage can” (“contene-
dor de basura,” p. 18) and “tramp” (“vago,”
p. 20). The use of standard Spanish by Ar-
gentinian translators for the publishing mar-
ket in Spain is common. Translation Studies
researcher Alejandrina Falcón has studied a
generation of editors, writers and translators
who emigrated to Spain after the military
overthrow in Argentina in 1976. She describes
how translators who used Latin American-
isms or Argentinisms needed to have their
works revised, whereas those who could use
peninsular Spanish in their translations were
paid more because revision was not need-
ed (Falcón, 2018, p. 199). Throughout the
publishing boom in the 1980s and beyond,
a generation of editors and translators and a
tradition developed, though Falcón is critical
of the European variety being used so widely
as the standard, or as the basis for a “neutral
Spanish,” to the detriment of standard Argen-
tinian Spanish (Falcón, 2018, pp. 107–127).
Because Hojman uses the source text restored
in 1991, he reveals Bigger’s thoughts of Mary’s
breasts while he caressed Bessie: “Le puso las
manos en los pechos igual que como lo había
hecho con Mary la noche anterior y mientras
la besaba pensaba en ello” (Wright, 2022,
p. 169). In the example below, we can see how
the “galloping-frantic-horse-racing-down-a-
steep-hill-with-the-wind-against-him” text
which had been self-censored by Pedro Lec-
uona in 1941 has been restored. A back-trans-
lation is not needed to be able to compare with
Wright’s 1940 source text, for the closeness to
the source text is patent (see Example 3).
Bessie había puesto las manos en el pecho de
él, extendiendo los dedos en señal de protes-
ta, empujando para sacárselo de encima. La
oyó emitir un débil gemido que parecía no
tener fin, incluso cuando ella inhalaba o ex-
halaba; un gemido que también le pareció
lejano y al que tampoco le prestó atención.
Tenía que hacerlo en ese mismo momento. Sí.
Bessie. Su deseo estaba desnudo y caliente en

Daniel Linder424Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
sus manos y sus dedos la tocaban. Sí. Bessie.
Ahora. Tenía que hacerlo ahora. «No, Bigger,
no.» Lo lamentaba, pero tenía que hacerlo. No
podía evitarlo. Evitarlo. Lo siento. Evitarlo. Lo
siento. Evitarlo. Lo siento. Evitarlo, ya. Ella
debería. ¡Mira! Ella debería debería debería
mirar. Mirar cómo estaba él. Él. Él estaba. Se
sentía mal por cómo se sentiría ella, pero ya no
podía evitarlo. Se sentía. Bessie. Ahora. Todo.
Oyó sus fuertes jadeos y su propia respiración
que entraba y salía con fuerza. «Bigger.» Aho-
ra. Todo. Todo. Ahora. Todo. «Bigger…».
(Wright, 2022, p. 289)
We can also see that the movie house mastur-
bation scene has also been restored. In sec-
tion 2, we saw the first half of this raw passage.
The fragments highlighted above show how
the different expressions used to refer to ejac-
ulation (pull off and be gone) are reinforced
and slightly intensified through repetition of
the common colloquial Spanish verb “cor-
rerse” (“to come”). Hojman’s translation is
brave and modern, intensifying also the use of
the low-intensity “damn” to a high-intensity
Spanish equivalent of “fuck.”
4. Conclusions
We have examined two versions of the source
text, Native Son (1940, 1991), by Richard Wright,
one self-censored and the other unexpurgated
and restored. We have analyzed three target
texts in Spanish, one self-censored (Sangre neg-
ra, trans. Pedro Lecuona, 1941), another revised
but not restored (Hijo nativo, trans. Pedro Lecuo-
na, 1987) and the latest uncensored, unexpurgat-
ed and restored (Hijo de esta tierra, trans. Eduardo
Hojman, 2022). In these translations, we have
located evidence of self-censorship, including
omitted fragments and a lengthier, entirely re-
written passage, both triggered by sexual refer-
ences in an erotic encounter and in a rape scene,
respectively. We have also found evidence of
conservation of sex-related language and even
intensification of sexual references in the latest
Spanish translation by Hojman. We have also
seen how the external state censorship system
in Spain under Franco prevented the Argentin-
ian translation by Lecuona from being imported
into Spain on two occasions (1944 and 1953),
and these failed attempts provided an opportuni-
ty to study the conservative reports made by the
censors, focused mostly on the explicit sexual
references and the extensive mention of com-
munism in the novel.
Despite the (self-)censorship, which stripped
the source text of a scene where the main
character and a friend both masturbate in a
public movie theater and excised from the first
Spanish target text an explicit, though brief,
Example 4. Translation by Hojman of the Movie Masturbation Scene (See Also Section 3).
Native Son (1940) Hijo de esta tierra (Trans. Hojman, 2022)
Bigger saw Jack lean forward and stretch out his legs,
rapidly
“You gone?”
“Yee-eeah. …”
“You pull off fast…”
Again they were silent. Then Bigger leaned forward,
breathing hard.
“I’m gone…God…damn…”
They sat still for five minutes, slumped down in their
seats. They finally straightened.
“I don’t know where to put my feet now,” Bigger said,
laughing. “let’s take another seat.”
“O.K.”
They moved to other seats. (Wright, 1991b, p. 473)
Bigger vio que Jack se inclinaba hacia delante y
estiraba las piernas rígidas.
—¿Ya estás?
—Sí …sí.
—Te corres rápido...
Volvieron a callarse. Luego Bigger se inclinó hacia
delante, jadeando.
—Me corro... Dios... Joder...
Se quedaron quietos unos cinco minutos,
repantigados en sus asientos. Por fin, se enderezaron.
—No sé dónde poner los pies ahora -dijo Bigger
riendo-. Sentémonos en otro sitio.
—Vale.
Se pasaron a otras butacas. (Wright, 2022, p. 46)

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish425Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°2, 2023, julio-diciembre,pp.405-428
reference to infidelity as well as a lengthy,
though less explicit, scene of rape, the novel’s
sex-related language is not missing entirely.
In fact, there are plenty of other references
to observing and touching breasts as well as
making love which were not cropped. Insofar
as this broad theme in the novel is concerned,
the essential meaning of the authentic, crude
sexuality of the main character Bigger Thom-
as was not changed except for the degree of
explicitness and the intensity of this facet of
his character. Comparing and contrasting
these instances of self-censorship with the un-
expurgated version of the source text that was
published in 1991 and the Spanish translation
of this text in 2022, we see that the fullness of
Richard Wright’s novel has been restored and as
a classic Black us author he has been made more
contemporary by the restoration and the new
translation into Spanish.
In focusing only on the sex-related language
in Native Son, we have chosen to disregard
the novel’s political aspects, namely the men-
tion of communism in Book One and Book
Three. In future research efforts homing in
on Richard Wright and other Black Ameri-
can authors translated into Spanish or other
co-national languages in Spain (Catalan, Gali-
cian, Basque), it would be worthwhile to focus
on the translation of politically sensitive texts
containing references to communism such as
Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade (1947) or Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Also worthwhile
to examine would be the translations of wom-
en Black American authors such as Maya An-
gelou, Zora Neale Hurston, Tony Morrison
and Alice Walker. In relation to one of the
main focuses of this article, self-censorship, fu-
ture research could attempt to find more cases,
compile these cases and attempt to determine
how prevalent self-censorship in comparison
to external censorship was during Francoism.
Whether Eduardo Hojman’s retranslation
should be used from this point onwards, how-
ever, will depend on the readers. Hojman’s
text is available as a new book in bookstores
and online, though the earlier translations are
still available in second-hand bookstores and in
public libraries. It is hard to measure the impact
of a retranslation such as Hojman’s in the short
term, because new book sales, critical reviews
and social media mentions can stoke up a lon-
ger-term interest in the writer, an empathy for
restoring wrongs in the historical memory, and
an increase in second-hand book sales. Wardle
has analyzed how retranslations are often avail-
able simultaneously with earlier translations,
particularly in online outlets (2019, p. 224).
Hojman’s translation has the quality read-
ers seek and soon will be joined in the second
quarter of 2023 by a new translation of Richard
Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy (1945), also
by Alianza Editorial (Madrid). A raw sexual ref-
erence from this book’s first half was similarly
self-censored by Wright at the request of the
publisher and an additionally self-censored
Spanish version was published legally in Ma-
drid in 1950 and a second, condensed, version
by Reader’s Digest was authorized in 1973 after
voluntary consultation. I hope that this study
provides, on the one hand, the contexts, con-
nections and analytical scrutiny readers need
to understand the multi-centered, pluricultural
reception of the source texts and target texts in
Spanish and, on the other hand, the theoretical
reflections and intellectual challenges readers
thirst for as they try to grasp the complex, inter-
related and overlapping phenomena of pre-pub-
lication censorship, post-publication censorship
and self-censorship, the latter of which may be
triggered by either of the two other types.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deep gratitude to
Nathanial Gardner, University of Glasgow,
for reading an early draft; to Chloé Signès,
University of Salamanca, for her into-French
translation expertise; and Ana María Fraile
Marcos, University of Salamanca, for her gen-
erous input on Richard Wright scholarship
in Spain and worldwide. Lastly, I express my

Daniel Linder426Traducción (auto)censurada en los mundos hispánicos
appreciation for the constructive feedback by
the two peer reviewers whose expert recom-
mendations and reflections clearly bolstered
the quality of the finished article. Gracias.
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How to cite this article: Linder, D. (2023). (Self)censored at home and away: Richard Wright’s
Native son (1940) in Spanish. Mutatis Mutandis, Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, 16(2), 405-
428. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut.v16n2a08