The Mary Jacobs Prize Essay 2023: ‘Translation and Ideology in Sylvia Townsend Warner: Six Romances of the Spanish Civil War into English’

Abstract

Upon her return to Britain from Spain following her attendance at the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture held in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia in 1937, Sylvia Townsend Warner translated six Spanish romances. Five of the six Spanish poems examined here – those by Leopoldo Urrutia, Manuel Altolaguirre, Julio D. Guillén, José Herrera Petere and Félix Paredes – first appeared in Romancero general de la guerra de España (1937). The sixth, by Francisco Fuentes, had been published in 1936 in Milicia Popular. This article analyses Warner’s English versions of these poems with the aims of illuminating the political motives behind her translation decisions and adding to our knowledge of her relation to the urgent cultural politics of the late 1930s.

Keywords

• ideology
• Spanish Civil War
• translation
• poetry
• propaganda
• romancero