Censorship in Translation in the Soviet Union: The Manipulative Rewriting of Howard Fast's Novel The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

Abstract

Although translated literature was widely consumed in the Soviet Union, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to how translators negotiated the ideological and political forces present in the Soviet literary field. Defining censorship as a manipulative rewriting of discourses, the process under which texts are censored in the process of translation is examined using, as a case study, Howard Fast's novel The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Howard Fast, an American writer, was a committed Communist until 1957, and wrote several left-wing novels. The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti recounts the true story of two Italian radicals whose wrongful execution for murder caused protests around the world in the nineteen-twenties. Close comparison of the source and target texts demonstrates a large number of small shifts which, when viewed cumulatively, significantly affect the ideological positioning of the Russian target text. The overall result of these shifts, motivated by the unification of the linguistic field, is to create intertextuality with Soviet Socialist Realist discourse.     

Challenging disenchantment The discreet charm of occult TV

Abstract

Occult imagery is widespread in the contemporary global mediaverse, including in TV programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Sightings, and The X-Files. This article considers the popular cultural presence of the otherworldly and the magical in relation to the strand of theorizing, beginning with Max Weber and taking a postmodern turn in Jean Baudrillard, that treats the cultures of Western modernity as disenchanted ones. In particular, it turns to Baudrillard's concept of seduction, which, while generating controversy in cultural theory circles, has had only a limited impact in media studies. The article argues that 'tele-visions of the otherworldly' constitute an enchanting challenge to modernist dis-illusionment, serve as a counterpoint to Baudrillard's 'obscene' media hyperrealism, and promote forms of imagination that, like magic realist literary fiction, undermine certain drives toward mastery associated with the dominant knowledge formations of Western modernity. TV's occult imagery can thus serve as the site of an unsettled and unsettling critical imagination, a skeptical popular subjunctivity.     

'More Than Just a Hill of Beans': Contested Landscapes in John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War

Abstract

The American Southwest is often considered to be a harsh and unforgiving environment, yet it remains an area where indigenous communities have lived for centuries and since being opened up as a tourist destination in the late nineteenth century has witnessed an incredible growth of major urban conurbations. It is a fragile environment coming under increasing pressure and nowhere is this more apparent than in the competition for scarce water resources. Water issues remain high on the political agenda and the threat to small scale acequia farming is under intense pressure from larger agribusiness. This essay, which adopts an ecocritical perspective, revisits John Nichols' 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War , analysing his literary strategies as he explores the ramifications of differing interpretations of land use on the contested landscapes of New Mexico.