Revisiting The Confessions of Nat Turner: Censorship in its Spanish Translation

Abstract

This paper studies the Spanish translation of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. It observes the effects that institutional and self-censorship have had in Andrés Bosch’s version, first published in 1968 by Lumen as Las Confesiones de Nat Turner.

Presented as the fictional autobiography of a historical figure, the novel is based on a failed revolt that took place in a Virginia plantation in 1831. The source context is described and contrasted with the target one, paying attention to the paratexts that have conditioned the novel’s reception in Spain. Accessing the General Archive of the Administration shows that Bosch’s translation was self-censored in a possible attempt to avoid the institutional intervention that would have delayed the book’s publication. Research also shows that this same version is the one being republished in the early twenty-first century.