A Clash with Censorship: Applying a Grounded-Theory Approach to Arturo Barea’s La llama

Abstract

Arturo Barea (b. Badajoz, Spain, 1897; d. Faringdon, England, 1957) belongs to one of the most significant groups of exiles of the twentieth century. His ideology—a republican turned self-proclaimed socialist—and the content and setting of his autobiographical novel—the Spanish Civil War—posed a threat to the national Catholic regime, as he attacked its moral, religious and political values. Consequently, Barea's novel was never submitted to the censorship board, as it was clear that publication in Spain during the dictatorship was not possible. With this hypothetical functional context (skopos) and its historical context, the novel has been coded according to the Grounded Theory (GT) methodology, using open, axial and selective coding, establishing possible categories of translation problems. A system based on so-called “anchor words” has served to scrutinise the digitalised source text and create an Excel-sampled corpus which includes 378 textual segments. The proposed GT-based method, with its translation problem constructs and constituting variables and attributes, has helped to identify those specific variables (and their subcategories) to analyse how this content type would have suffered from censorship or self-censorship.