Translation as Propaganda: British Poetic Involvement in the Spanish Civil War

Alicia Fernández Gallego-Casilda (Autonomous University of Barcelona/Nottingham) will be giving a talk on British poets joining the Spanish Civil War.

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 attracted much international attention. In Britain, most progressive writers at the time were already unhappy about the failure of the government to resolve the socioeconomic problems that followed World War I. The rise of Fascism throughout Europe had further contributed to the general climate of crisis in the West. The war in Spain was therefore the final push that made the British intelligentsia embrace radical Leftist doctrines en masse. Political absolutism was seen as a necessary position, e.g. the 1937 questionnaire Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, edited by Nancy Cunard and published by the Marxist periodical Left Review. Several of the signatories of this text formed part of the British delegation that attended the II International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture held in Spain that year. The Congress was not only the biggest propaganda effort on the part of the Republican government during the war, but also the catalyst for the many translations into English of Spanish poems that intended to influence government policy and public opinion. These translations respond to both political and aesthetic affinities with the original authors of the poems. By way of illustration, translations by Nancy Cunard, Stephen Spender, and Sylvia Townsend Warner will be examined to explore the mechanisms deployed to achieve the desired ideological impact.

All welcome! Tea and coffee available from 3:45pm

Further dates for your diaries:

29 March: Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, 'Representations of Russian and Soviet colonialism in the Arctic in Contemporary Cinema'

3 May: Alison Fell (Liverpool), 'Joan of Arc as a Cultural Model for Armed Women in the Global South, 1870-1945'