Censorship, Retranslation and Invisibility in the Spanish Edition of Nabokov’s Lolita

Magalí Libardi^[1]*

Universidad del Salvador

Argentina

Resumen

En 1959 la editorial argentina Sur publicó la primera traducción al español de Lolita, el controversial best-seller del escritor ruso-estadounidense Vladimir Nabokov. La versión estuvo a cargo del traductor, crítico, profesor y, posteriormente, secretario de redacción de la revista Sur, Enrique Pezzoni. Esa traducción, que Pezzoni publicó con el pseudónimo Enrique Tejedor, fue luego adquirida por editorial Grijalbo y, en 1986, por Anagrama. En 2002 Anagrama decidió sacarla de circulación y encargar una nueva traducción a Francesc Roca.  La retraducción fue motivada, al menos parcialmente, por la evidente censura y consecuente distorsión del mensaje original en la versión atribuida a Enrique Tejedor, que de todos modos circuló en el mercado hispanohablante durante más de cuarenta años. Las hipótesis centrales de este trabajo son, en primer lugar, que Enrique Pezzoni no es responsable de la censura ejercida sobre el texto, y que, por lo tanto, no se han publicado dos versiones en español de Lolita sino tres desde 1959 hasta la actualidad, y, en segundo lugar, que la traducción de Roca se nutre de la versión de Pezzoni, aunque en ningún momento se lo mencione. Mediante el análisis comparativo, se intentará demostrar que la historia de esta novela en su versión en español involucra a numerosos actores anónimos, cuya interacción con el texto ha resultado en la gradual desvinculación de Pezzoni de su obra.

Palabras clave: Vladimir Nabokov, traducción, literatura comparada, estudios de traducción, crítica de traducción.

Abstract

In 1959 the Argentine publishing house Sur published the first Spanish translation of the novel Lolita, a controversial best-seller by the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov. The rendition was the work of the translator, critic, professor, and, later on, editorial assistant for Sur magazine, Enrique Pezzoni. Said translation –which appeared under the pseudonym Enrique Tejedor at Pezzoni’s request–, was later acquired by the publishing house Grijalbo and, in 1986, by yet another publisher, Anagrama. In 2002, Anagrama commissioned a new translation, done by Francesc Roca. The retranslation was at least partially motivated by the evident censorship and consequent distortion of the original text in the translation allegedly done by Enrique Tejedor, which still managed to circulate in the Spanish-speaking market for over forty years. This paper explores two hypotheses. Firstly, that Enrique Pezzoni is not responsible for the censorship exercised on the text, which in turn means that there have not been two but three versions of Lolita in Spanish since 1959 and, secondly, that Roca’s retranslation is, at the very least, derivative of Pezzoni’s. Through comparative analysis we will try to demonstrate that the history of this novel in Spanish involves numerous actors, whose interaction with the text has resulted in Pezzoni’s forced estrangement from his own work.  

Keywords: Vladimir Nabokov, translation, comparative literature, translation studies, translation criticism.

Fecha de recepción: 17-09-2018. Fecha de aceptación: 01-11-2018.

In 1955, Vladimir Nabokov, “an American writer who has once been a Russian one” (Nabokov, 1967, p. 128), published his novel Lolita. After three rejections in the United States, the manuscript made its way to France and, more specifically, to Olympia Press, a publishing house owned by Maurice Girodias. Although it is true that Olympia Press had published several noteworthy texts of the avant-garde (works by Jean Genet and Henry Miller, among others), its primary output was erotic fiction, a fact unknown by Nabokov that would not favor the reception of the novel in the United States. Lolita was published in two volumes in September and not long after was discovered by Graham Greene, who recommended it as one of the best books of 1955 in a piece for the Sunday Times. The debate soon transcended mere literary circles with the novel becoming a matter of public morality: it was censored in France on three occasions as well as in Britain, Belgium and Austria, while in Canada its importation was banned briefly. Nabokov was worried about the possibility of the text being censored in the United States, and the professional and financial backlash this would entail, which was why in 1956 he agreed to write an essay meant to accompany the long excerpts of the novel that Anchor Review first published in the United States in 1957. In “On a book entitled Lolita” (which has since then become the afterword to the American edition) Nabokov puts forward his creative process and assures readers that “Lolita has no moral in tow” (Nabokov, 1991, p. 314). The author holds the same stance in a letter he wrote to Girodias on March 10th, 1957, in which he regrets the legal hardships faced by the publisher and worries about the commercial future of his work:

My moral defense of the book is the book itself. I do not feel under any obligation to do more […]. On the ethical plane, it is of supreme indifference to me what opinion French, British or any other courts, magistrates, or philistine readers in general, may have of my book. (Nabokov, 1989, p.  210)

Lolita was finally published in the United States on July 21st, 1958, and became a best-seller by January, 1959. It was never officially censored and despite its abundant and extremely controversial critical history (Ocampo, 1959), it established Nabokov as a world-renowned author. He never regretted having written the novel (Nabokov, 1964).

The Argentine publishing house Sur published the first translation of Lolita into Spanish in 1959. The edition was the work of the translator, critic, professor, and, later on, editorial assistant for Sur magazine, Enrique Pezzoni. By then, Pezzoni had translated authors such as Carlo Levi, Guido Piovene, Julien Green, Caroline Gordon, Bertram David Wolfe and Roger Caillois and, after Lolita, went on to translate, among others, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, also by Vladimir Nabokov and Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.

Immediately after the novel was published in Argentina, and through a decree issued by the municipal authorities of Buenos Aires (Resolución 7718/1959), the book was deemed immoral and all copies were seized. The case “Editorial Sur c/ Municipalidad de Buenos Aires” made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the seizure in 1963 (Fallos 257:275).

As a response to the decree, Sur allotted over thirty pages of issue 260 of the magazine (September and October 1959) to the “‘Lolita’ file” or “Caso ‘Lolita’”. In said dossier, the editors, together with a group of critics and notable authors, answered a survey on the subjects of censorship and Nabokov’s novel. Pezzoni himself wrote about the literary merit of the work and the nonsense of imposing on it a moral reading:

Dilucidar si es justa o no la prohibición de Lolita no me parece menos baladí que condenar la novela porque nos cuenta los amores de una niña con un hombre maduro. ¿Estamos espiando por el agujero de una cerradura o somos lectores lúcidos y conscientes de la ficción literaria? Por mi parte, quisiera decir desde ahora que no veo en Lolita otra cosa que eso: una obra de ficción cuya arquitectura es de una destreza tal que no podemos sino acceder a ella. Quien tenga una idea, siquiera difusa, de lo que es la pornografía, no pensará un instante en asociar con ella a Lolita. (Pezzoni, 1959, p. 69)^[2]

It is by no means surprising that in his remarks Pezzoni should avoid referring to his role as translator of the novel, for he asked that his edition be published under the pseudonym Enrique Tejedor. He hoped to distance himself from any controversies that may impact his professional life and altogether “evitar la persecución pretendidamente justiciera de los guardianes de la moral literaria, que nunca son los guardianes del buen decir, sino los peleles fantasmáticos de la estupidez” (Panesi, 1989, p. 5)^[3].

Sur published Pezzoni’s translation again in 1961, this time with an inscription printed on the front flap that warned the book was not to be sold within the municipality of Buenos Aires. In 1975 the translation was acquired by Editorial Grijalbo, and in 1986 it was bought by Anagrama, who published it until 2002. The Grijalbo and Anagrama editions are not, however, exact copies of the translation Pezzoni did for Sur, despite Enrique Tejedor being the only translator credited in both cases. The modifications, some of which will be analyzed in the following pages, are significant and affect not only the style but the integrity of the work in question. If one may say about Pezzoni's translation of Lolita that it has for years been the door through which the Spanish speaking world has entered the Nabokov universe (Tullio, 2014, p. 6), it is necessary also to remark that said door has corresponded, in the vast majority of cases, with the editions published by Grijalbo and Anagrama, not the one published by Sur.

In 2002, Anagrama published a new translation of Lolita, attributed to Francesc Roca. This edition replaced Pezzoni’s and has been republished on numerous occasions. The most recent one is the hardcover edition or “Limited Edition” from October 2016^[4].

Francesc Roca is listed in Anagrama’s catalog as the translator of David Lodge, Truman Capote, Robert Penn Warren, Oliver Sacks, Jack Kerouac, Harold Brodkey, William S. Burroughs, Susan Faludi, Xavier Rubert de Ventós, Orson Welles, Robert Hughes, Noam Chomsky and Vladimir Nabokov. It is surprising that, despite such an array of prestigious authors, there is almost no information available on him. His edition of Lolita includes no paratexts, and neither has the translator given any interviews, nor are there any academic papers or articles allegedly penned by him. He has no online presence, not even a profile on Anagrama’s website, and the publisher ignores requests for information concerning their translators. For the purposes of this paper it will be assumed that he is an individual, but, evidently, a group of translators could also be working together under a single pseudonym.

Hypothesis

The translation of Lolita must be considered from its two dimensions: that of content and that of form. The fact that the novel elicited a particular moral response in some of its readers together with its publication in Spain during the period that, in terms of censorship, Jeroen Vandaele refers to as “Late Francoism” (2010, p. 88) resulted in the circulation, between the years 1975 and 2002, of a mutilated version of Lolita in Spanish, which is attributed to Enrique Tejedor but differs from Pezzoni’s translated version for Sur.

Our first hypothesis is, therefore, that there are not at present two versions of Lolita in Spanish but three, since the differences are numerous and meaningful enough to allow us to speak of different texts altogether.

In his afterword, Nabokov paraphrases an anonymous critic and modifies his commentary: “an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution ‘English language’ for ‘romantic novel’ would make this elegant formula more correct” (Nabokov, 1991, p. 316), and in his Playboy interview of 1964 he says: “I have never been able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose” (Nabokov, 1964). These statements only reinforce that which the novel itself makes clear: that style lies at the heart of the text. Lolita practices what Nabokov makes the narrator say in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: “The Prismatic Bezel can be thoroughly enjoyed once it is understood that the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called ‘methods of composition’” (Nabokov, 1941, p. 93). In his 1989 essay, Trevor McNeely says: “Lolita was written to prove a simple point in a complex way. The point is that style can do anything” (McNeely, 1989, p. 185). The alliteration in the first lines of the first chapter, the careful selection of names, the precision of imagery (“the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip” [Nabokov, 1991, pp. 231-232]); the subtle ornament (“picnic, lightning” [Nabokov, 1991, p. 10]); the metalinguistic oddities (“where he lay –a banked banker so to speak– was not in a dead faint […]” [Nabokov, 1991, p. 98]), are only a few of the instances that testify to both the careful composition and the constant delight the author takes in a language that he feels close enough to produce literature in, and foreign enough to fascinate him.

If we accept that all translation implies an act of interpretation, that “existe una constatación general de ello en el aserto de que no hay dos traducciones iguales de un mismo texto ni siquiera de un mismo traductor en dos tiempos distintos. Estilos y estéticas varían según épocas y lugares, modas e imposiciones” (Féliz Fernadez y Ortega Arjonilla, 1997, p. 38)^[5], and that, as a result, “en materia de traducción literaria esta no puede ser sino creativa, como lo es toda lectura de un texto” (Pezzoni, 1976, p. 124)^[6], then it is logical also to admit that a highly aesthetic novel will result in a wide spectrum of translation possibilities. Our second hypothesis is that the new translation by Roca, in which he appears as the only translator, must display novel solutions to the challenges posed by the source text. All sustained similarities between his version and Pezzoni’s must be the result of the reading and “transference” of the first translation into the second one.

Contrastive analysis: the translations by Enrique Tejedor/Pezzoni

As evidenced by the passages in Table 1 of the Appendix, there are full sections missing both in the 1975 Grijalbo edition and in the 1986 Anagrama edition, and the text has been modified to make sense without them. At the same time, there are minor differences between the three editions. In the same paragraph from which the first extract is taken, Anagrama transforms “malla” into “traje de baño”, “armónicas más ásperas” into “efluvios más ásperos”, “en movimiento de inmediato” into “de inmediato en movimiento”. The phrase “mi virilidad”, which appears in the Sur version but is omitted in Grijalbo, becomes “mi masculinidad” in Anagrama; “estera” becomes “esterilla”, “mamá paquidérmica”, “paquidérmica mamá”. Grijalbo omits “el verde, rojo, azul Príapo” which Pezzoni does translate, and the omission persists in Anagrama; “napas” is replaced by “manchas” and what is translated in the Sur edition as “mi gula” inexplicably becomes “mi guía” in the later editions.

The paragraph is indicative of the general treatment given to the original translation. The Grijalbo edition presents a first revision of Pezzoni’s text, which mutilates the original version so as to make it into a more decorous text (thus turning it, in a way, into a modern belle infidel). The Anagrama edition reproduces those modifications but also attempts to “neutralize” or, at least, de-regionalize the language, and adds minor stylistic changes. This information is not consigned anywhere in the editions considered. The translator is always Enrique Tejedor, but it seems unlikely that Pezzoni would accept these prudish changes both because he had had no problem producing a much more explicit and faithful version sixteen years earlier, and because of his stance regarding neutral Spanish: “Creo que el traductor debe atreverse a usar la lengua de su comunidad, con todas sus peculiaridades pero fijándose un límite” (Pezzoni, 1976, pp. 124-125)^[7].

We must, therefore, speak of two (or even three) renditions of Lolita into Spanish attributed to Enrique Tejedor. The first one, published by Sur, is entirely the work and responsibility of Enrique Pezzoni. The second one and its modified version, published by Grijalbo and Anagrama, respectively, are so only in part.

Contrastive analysis: the translations by Pezzoni and Roca

Table 2 in the Appendix shows the very first lines of the novel. Pezzoni makes use of hyperbaton to preserve the rhythm and symmetry of the original and to compensate the loss of alliteration (incidentally, this is the same strategy used by Nabokov in his translation of the novel into Russian). Roca’s version is identical.

Table 3 in the Appendix shows Pezzoni making use of a reasonable modulation (the perspective shifts from one foot to the other), while the first Grijalbo/Anagrama version distorts the meaning slightly (since Lolita is not fully barefooted in the original). Roca’s version is a case of overtranslation (there is no need to know that she’s standing straight and the phrase “enfundada en un calcetín” implies a heaviness that contradicts the spirit of the original formula: “in one sock – in slacks – on the dotted line”). The most accurate measurement is the one used in Grijalbo and Anagrama versions.

 In the next example, taken from that same paragraph (Table 4 in the Appendix), Pezzoni’s translation is literal while the terms are inverted in Roca’s. The strategy chosen by the latter facilitates comprehension but betrays the objective of the original (immediately after this the narrator adds: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”).

In the line found in Table 5 of the Appendix, Pezzoni compensates the loss of alliteration in the first sentence by reinforcing the metaphoric image in a way that is appropriate to Humbert Humbert’s narrative voice. Roca’s literal rendition forgoes part of the aesthetic load. The second sentence in Roca is exactly the same as Pezzoni’s in Anagrama.

The parenthesis in Table 6 may seem insubstantial but it comprises the only words Humbert will devote to his mother in the introduction. It is true that Spanish prefers explicit linking of elements and “se caracteriza todavía por su mayor profundidad o ‘densidad sintáctica’ y por el enlace de ‘circunstantes’” (Vázquez-Ayora, 1977, p. 111)^[8], but completing the phrase in this case diminishes the emotional, connotative value of the comment. Roca’s version is identical to the Grijalbo/Anagrama version, except for the change in spelling in the word “picnic.”

In the following example (Table 7), Pezzoni’s translation is particularly creative and idiosyncratic. “Penumbra estival” for “summer dusk” is a correct, precise, and elegant option but it is certainly not the most obvious one. There is, as well, a curious “transposition”, not of syntactic categories but of texture: “furry” becomes “sedosa”. Roca’s version reproduces all of Pezzoni’s choices.

The brief selection in Table 8 shows Anagrama correcting an undesired omission in Pezzoni’s version, overlooked also by Grijalbo.

The more extensive excerpt in Table 9 shows how Pezzoni’s and Roca’s translations coincide almost entirely. The only differences are the addition of two verbs and the paraphrase “a todos caía bien”.

Again, in Table 10, Roca’s translation is identical to the one published by Anagrama and credited to Tejedor, which reproduces the changes made to the original by Grijalbo and adds a few more. In the paragraph that includes this selection, and which is over two hundred words long, there are only six differences between the old Anagrama edition and Roca’s new version (“iba” instead of “asistía”, “kilómetros” instead of “millas”, “sacaba muy buenas notas” instead of “obtenía excelentes calificaciones”, “la rosaleda” instead of “el rosal”, “habría” instead of “habríamos”, “a quien recurrir” instead of “con quien consolarme”).

In Table 11 Roca’s version coincides with Pezzoni’s in the use of the phrase “oscura intimidad”, despite there being nothing in “innerside” that might lead one directly to the notion of “intimidad”. The choice is creative and subjective. At the same time, Roca’s version perpetuates the transposition (possibly unfounded) that Pezzoni resorts to in “objective”. The word seems to function as an adjective in the original, not as a noun. The differences between versions are limited to the change of an adjective that ends in –mente for the alternative phrase “de manera” plus and adjective, and the paraphrase “desde un punto de vista óptico”.    

The coincidences between editions become less pronounced as the novel advances, but Pezzoni’s text consistently underlies Roca’s. The fragments selected attempt to show that the relationship between these versions is not altogether different from the one that has been shown to exist through the first analysis: Francesc Roca’s version is not an autonomous translation but a hybrid text that takes the revised and censored version of Pezzoni’s translation as a guide and tries, above all else, to recover the missing segments.

Conclusion

The modified versions of Pezzoni’s translation published by Grijalbo and Anagrama make no explicit mention of the changes undergone by the text, leaving the reader with the wrong impression not only of the original novel but of the ability and work ethic of its translator. Pezzoni always aimed to reinvent the visions of the world as they appeared in the original in his own versions (Pezzoni, 1976, p. 124), but the numerous omissions present in those later editions necessarily hinder said recreation. It is unfortunate that it should be those editions that have circulated for so many decades among Spanish speakers, and that they should be the ones that the average reader associates with Enrique Pezzoni.

Literary retranslation is an enriching activity and, in many cases, a necessary one.  Enrique Pezzoni’s translation for Sur is not flawless. Lolita dies giving birth to a boy (p. 8) instead of a girl, Humbert goes to a “psicópata” (p. 9) instead of to a psychopathologist, and the reader doesn’t find out that Humbert was born in Paris (p. 12), nor that Aunt Sybil wrote poetry (p. 13). No translation is perfect, and mistakes and minor oversights are an expected corollary of the way in which translators are made to work: “El mal pagado traductor por lo general debe cumplir con plazos más o menos rígidos, y para ganarse la vida no puede sino acumular traducciones y reducir el tiempo que puede destinar a cada una” (Pezzoni, 1976, p. 126)^[9].  Second translations shine a light on obscurities present in previous renditions and bring new life to the original in the target language: “Las traducciones envejecen y, para seguir cumpliendo con su función comunicativa, se efectúan nuevas traducciones para acercarlas a los lectores” (Hurtado Albir, 2010)^[10].  

The new edition of Lolita in Spanish holds the inscription “Traducción de Francesc Roca”. Pezzoni´s pseudonym has been obliterated, but the text could not exist without him. According to Antoine Berman, retranslation is done for the original and against preexisting translations (Berman, 2014, p. 116), but in the second section of this analysis we have tried to show that Roca’s translation was not done “against” but “on top of” Pezzoni’s version and its later anonymous revisions. When in his article “Música y sentido: las aliteraciones” (2017) for the translation journal El Trujamán Mario Grande references the opening of Lolita and writes “En la traducción al castellano Francesc Roca (2002) lo traduce como ‘entrañas’”^[11], Grande ignores the fact that Pezzoni had already translated the term as “entrañas” in 1959. He takes for granted that all the indispensible information concerning the translation of the novel is included in the book it is in, and said book makes no reference to its first Spanish translator.

Pezzoni’s translation is the result of the talent, technique and expertise of a particular translator at a particular point in time. It is right for flaws to be mended in later editions, but it is also right for those editions to highlight the virtues of that previous translation. Giving visibility to the translation history of a novel is paramount if we are ever to find a solution to the problem that Pezzoni already identified as most troubling and prevalent in the life of the literary translator back in 1976: the lack of recognition as creator to which he is subject (Pezzoni, 1976, p. 125).

References

Berman, A. (2014). La traducción y la letra o el albergue de lo lejano (I. Rodríguez, Trans.). Buenos Aires: Dedalus.

Félix Fernández, L. & Ortega Arjonilla, E. (Eds.). (1997). Estudios sobre traducción e interpretación. Málaga: Centro de ediciones de la Diputación de Málaga.

Grande, M. (2017, April 28). Música y sentido: las aliteraciones. El Trujamán. Recuperado 2 November 2017 from: https://cvc.cervantes​.es/trujaman/anteriores/abril_17/28042017.htm 

Hurtado Albir, A. & Pavón, H. (2010). Amparo Hurtado Albir: “Las traducciones envejecen”. Revista Ñ. Retrieved on 2 November 2017 from: http://edant.revistaenie.clarin.com/notas/2010/05/19/_-021974​74.htm 

McNeely, T. (1989). “Lo” and Behold: Solving the “Lolita” Riddle. Studies in the Novel, 21:2, 182-199. Retrieved on 2 November 2017 from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29532635 

Nabokov, V. & Appel, A. (1967). An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 8- 2, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 127-152. Retrieved on 26 October 2017 from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207097 

Nabokov, V. & Appel, A. (1991). The Annotated Lolita (2nd ed.). London: Penguin Books.

Nabokov, V. & Toffler, A. (1964). Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov. Playboy, 20-45. Retrieved on 2 November 2017 from: http://reprints.​longform.org/playboy-interview-vladimir-nabokov

Nabokov, V. (1941). The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. New York: Vintage.

Nabokov, V. (1959). Lolita (E. Tejedor, Trans.). Buenos Aires: Sur.

Nabokov, V. (1961). Lolita (E. Tejedor, Trans.). Buenos Aires: Sur.

Nabokov, V. (1980). Lolita (4th ed.) (E. Tejedor, Trans.). Barcelona: Grijalbo.

Nabokov, V. (1989). Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Nabokov, V. (1999). Lolita (12th ed.) (E. Tejedor, Trans.). Barcelona: Anagrama.

Nabokov, V. (2016). Lolita (F. Roca, Trans.). Barcelona: Anagrama.

Ocampo, V. et al. (1959). Crónicas: el caso ‘Lolita’. Sur, 260, 44-75.

P.E.N., Comité de Traducción (1970). Manifiesto sobre la traducción. (J. Rest, Trans.). Sur (1976), 338-339, 204-212.

Panesi, J. (1989). Enrique Pezzoni: profesor de literatura. Filología, 24 1-2, 5-10.

Pezzoni, E. (1976). El oficio de traducir. Sur, 338-339, 124-126.

Tullio, D. (2014, noviembre). La angustia de la elección imposible: el contexto de la traducción de Lolita de Enrique Pezzoni para la editorial Sur. Trabajo presentado en el VI Congreso Internacional de Letras: Transformaciones culturales. Debates de la teoría, la crítica y la lingüística. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Vandaele, J. (2010). “It Was What It Wasn’t: Translation and Francoism”. In Translation under Fascism. C. Rundle and K. Sturge (Eds.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vázquez-Ayora, G. (1977). Introducción a la traductología. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Appendix

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

Table 5

Table 6

Table 7

Table 8

Table 9

Table 10

Table 11