ABSTRACT
After more than 20 years during which no translations of foreign texts were permitted in Spain if they were not in tune with the Francoist regime, the work of Jean-Paul Sartre arrived in the 1960s in the form of translations into Catalan, despite the fact that his books had been on the list of Books Prohibited by the Catholic Church since 1948. The last years of the dictatorship, between 1965 and 1973, saw the publication of seven translations into Catalan of Sartre’s work. The aim of this study is to investigate the institutional censorship that these works underwent from the time the publishers requested the permits from the Ministry of Information and Tourism (MIT) up until the final authorizations were given. After a brief contextualization of the translations, this article concentrates on the analysis of the eight censors’ reports consulted in the General Archive of the Administration (AGA) situated near Madrid, in Alcalá de Henares. Seven permits were authorized and one rejected. The investigation enables us to see how the Francoist dictatorship reacted to the possibility of translating into Catalan works by Sartre, who were the censors who wrote the reports, what views they expressed and why, in spite of his being a banned author, the MIT finally authorized the translations.
