John Steinbeck and Censorship: the case of The Moon is Down translated into French during the Second World War
In this paper, the restricted meaning of the word censorship, whereby a text belonging to the literary field is manipulated in accordance with the issues of the political field in a society at a given period in its history, is applied to the analysis of the case of presumed censorship in two French translations of The Moon is Down made during the Second World War: the first by Marvède-Fischer published by éditions Marguerat in Lausanne in 1943; the second by Y. Desvignes (pseudoname of Yvonne Paraf) published by the éditions de Minuit in Paris in 1944. According to the éditions de Minuit, éditions Marguerat produced a censured version of Steinbeck’s text, which justified their retranslation of the novel. A careful examination of the text published by éditions Marguerat shows that this translation was not censored, at least not in the way indicated in the preface to the translation published by the éditions de Minuit that reports alleged ‘cuts’ and ‘modifications’ to the original text, among other textual manipulations. The Marguerat translation is, at best, a “hypertextual” (after Berman) translation of Steinbeck’s text. This is, without doubt, one of the reasons why the Minuit publishing house mistook the nature of this translation.