Spanish Translation and Reception of Evgeny Zamyatin’s We

Abstract

In 1921 Evgeny Zamyatin wrote We. This novel, which was a forerunner of the dystopian genre, was censored by Soviet authorities because of its satire of totalitarian regimes. Although Zamyatin’s novel inspired Orwell and Huxley, the Russian writer does not enjoy the same acknowledgment that these British authors. In addition to explaining the reasons for this lack of recognition, we have conducted a contrastive analysis between the Russian novel and four Spanish translations. This analysis shows that Zamyatin’s avant-garde style has been translated by a functional and transparent prose in the Spanish versions. The fact that the novel has been traditionally considered as science fiction could explain why translators have removed some of its striking formal features for the sake of the fluency that characterizes popular literary genres. The way in which a novel is translated depends sometimes on the genre in which it is classified.