Book review 
Christopher Rundle, Anne Lange and Daniele 
Monticelli, eds., Translation under Communism
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, 487 pp.  
Print version: ISBN 978-3-030-79663-1.
Reviewed by Borislava Eraković 
University of Novi Sad, Serbia
The last decade has seen several book publications 
and a significant number of articles in English pre-
senting developments in translation behind the 
Iron Curtain, and this interest is certainly not wan-
ing (cf. Baer 2011; Ceccherelli et al. 2014; Baer and 
Witt 2018; the list of articles would be too long to 
include here). The latest book addition to this body 
of work—Translation under Communism, edited by 
Christopher Rundle (University of Bologna), Anne 
Lange, and Daniele Monticelli (both Tallinn University)—offers a selection of perspec-
tives on the role that translation played in the USSR and eastern European socialist 
countries during diverse periods under communist rule. The volume offers valuable 
analyses of translation policies and practices in concrete circumstances and well-de-
scribed historical contexts. The editors emphasize the complexity of the roles translation 
played in various countries as well as for different agents, showing how the official party 
policies were often contradicted by what happened on the ground (30).
Depending on the focus of each chapter, the reader is introduced to the years of Sta-
linist rule and influence (the 1920s to 1950s in Russia and Ukraine, and then Yugo-
slavia), the brief Khrushchev Thaw following Stalin’s death, the late socialist period 
(1975–1989 in Poland), the entire socialist period (in the USSR, Slovenia, Bulgaria, 
and East Germany), or just one year (1965 in Czechoslovakia). The combination of 
a variety of perspectives successfully illustrates the ways these countries and systems 
were different, while at the same time allowing the common pattern of ideological 
control to emerge. As the editors state in the introductory section of the volume, 
129Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 129–132
special care is taken to avoid black-and-white descriptions of translation practices 
under communism and to portray the complexity of the scene.
The contributions in the volume exemplify applications of the multiple causation 
method in historical research on translation, which is based on a variety of archival 
resources: collections of literature, state documents, critical and bibliographical publi-
cations, editorial instructions and correspondence, protocols of translators’ meetings, 
interviews, translators’ memoirs, biographies, and personal diaries.
Most of the contributions conveniently start with an overview of the historical cir-
cumstances, helping the reader understand how individual contexts influenced both 
the similarities and differences regarding translation policies. The common pattern of 
shared practices thus appears: nationalizations of publishing houses, the Communist 
Party as the main instigator of cultural life, the perspective on translation as a means 
of inspiring a cosmopolitan outlook as opposed to a nationalist one in the reading 
public, and translators’ and editors’ self-censorship, most commonly induced by the 
general procedures that books underwent during the publishing process. On the oth-
er hand, the most striking differences are related to the level of freedom in the choice 
of books that could be translated, both during different periods of socialism and in 
different countries.
The volume is divided into four parts: the first presents the key features of translation 
and the history of communism, the second part is devoted to translation in the Soviet 
Union, and the third to eastern European socialist countries. The volume concludes 
with a response by Vitaly Chernetsky (University of Kansas).
In the second part, on literary translation in the USSR, the authors focus on the role of 
translation in the formation of the literary canon in a multinational society that aided 
the establishment of a Soviet identity (Nataliia Rudnytska, Ukrainian National Universi-
ty), early development of Russian translation theory through the changing perspectives 
of the theorist and translation critic Korney Chukovsky (Brian James Baer, Kent State 
University) and of the translator Mikhail Lozinsky (Susanna Witt, Stockholm Univer-
sity), and on how varied language policies affected the prevalent translation strategies 
in Soviet Ukraine for the duration of the Stalinist regime (Oleksandr Kalnychenko, 
Kharkiv National University, and Lada Kolomiyets, National University of Kyiv).
The third part deals with diverse translation issues and historical periods in socialist Yu-
goslavia (and Slovenia as its republic), Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgar-
ia, and Poland. The first chapter in this section, by Maria Rita Leto (D’Annunzio Univer-
sity), looks into the dynamic seven postwar years (1945–1952) of Yugoslavia (mostly in 
Serbia and Croatia) and the goals that the Communist Party realized by supporting the 
translation of literary, scientific, and scholarly texts. In a complementary contribution 
130 Book Review 
by Nike K. Pokorn (University of Ljubljana), the focus is on the mechanisms of ideo-
logical indoctrination through children’s literature, but also on cases of dissent through 
translation in Slovenia throughout the socialist period (1945–1990). Anikó Sohár (Péter 
Pázmány Catholic University) takes a view on the subversive role that fiction played 
throughout the period, marked by the longest-serving Hungarian socialist leader, János 
Kádár (1956–1989). The marginalized and therefore less regulated science fiction genre 
was an opportunity for disloyal authors and translators that were silenced by the re-
gime and could not publish “serious” literature. Hanna Blum (University of Graz) sees 
the prosperity and good working conditions of the state-abiding literary translators in 
East Germany as indicative of the intention of the state to ensure that art and culture 
would support the socialist system, values, and beliefs. Igor Tyšš (The Institute of World 
Literature, Slovakia) presents the circumstances of Allen Ginsberg’s deportation from 
Prague in 1965, also showing how carefully translators were monitored by the state at 
the time. As in the example of Slovenia, here again one sees censorship as inherent in the 
planning processes of the publishing houses. Krasimira Ivleva (independent research-
er, UK) looks into which texts were translated in socialist Bulgaria from French and 
Russian from the mid-1960s until the 1980s. Both Tyšš and Ivleva turn to paratexts in 
considering the ways translators made new translations possible and how the reception 
of foreign literature was framed through reviews and prefaces. In the last contribution 
in this section, Robert Looby (Catholic University of Lublin) describes the positive and 
not-so-positive features of the “underground” translation of historical, political, and 
memoire prose, and to a lesser extent fiction, during the last fourteen years of socialist 
Poland. Looby also addresses the CIA involvement as a distributor of books behind the 
Iron Curtain (388).
In the closing chapter, titled “The Response,” Vitaly Chernetsky summarizes the role 
of translation during the periods and in the societies presented in this volume: it was 
to popularize foreign literature that ideologically agreed with socialism and to make 
canonical Marxist texts available in other languages. Chernetsky also relates the high 
quality of translation first with the development of translation theory, which pre-
scribed the rules for producing good translations, and later with the rise of descriptive 
theory, which could explain why some translations were more successful than others. 
He addresses the change in the preferred choice of the main strategy in translation 
from foreignization, advocated by the Russian formalists in the 1920s, to domestica-
tion, which was characteristic of realist translations from the 1930s. Censorship and 
self-censorship are at the same time proofs and consequences of the state’s interest in 
controlling the messages that travelled across linguistic boundaries, which gave rise 
to underground or samizdat publications in some countries. Another conclusion is 
that the translators that followed official policies were prosperous and had a good 
131Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 129–132
social standing because the cultural and educational roles of translations were gener-
ally highly valued in socialist societies. He also comments on the deterioration of the 
status and practices of translation in the post-socialist societies due to the loss of state 
support, and he reflects on the role of the EU in supporting translation from languag-
es other than English today. In addition to summarizing the main aspects of the con-
tributions in the volume, Chernetsky also suggests further avenues of research that 
could improve our understanding of some of the phenomena under consideration.
The wealth of data presented in the volume almost lures the reader to compare the 
dates of first publications of the writers and works cited with the situation in the read-
er’s own country, allowing for some intriguing comparative conclusions. In addition 
to offering informative insight into methods and frameworks of historical research on 
translation, the volume invites further inquiry into other under-researched historical 
contexts. In conclusion, Translation under Communism is intriguing reading matter, 
highly recommendable to translation researchers and history enthusiasts alike.
References
Baer, Brian James, ed. 2011. Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts. Literary Translation in East-
ern Europe and Russia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Baer, Brian James, and Susanna Witt, eds. 2018. Translation in Russian Contexts: Culture, 
Politics, Identity. New York: Routledge.
Ceccherelli, Andrea, Lorenzo Costantino, and Cristiano Diddi, eds. 2014. Translation The-
ories in the Slavic Countries (= Europa Orientalis 25). Salerno: Università di Salerno.
About the author
Dr Borislava Eraković is Associate Professor at the English Department, Faculty 
of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad (Serbia), where she teaches courses on legal, 
technical, journalistic, and literary translation, translation theory, and career devel-
opment. She has authored two books, a number of articles, and chapters in edited 
volumes on social constructivism in translator training, the translation profession and 
theory in Serbia, and translation criticism. She has also translated fiction from English 
into Serbian and studies on Serbian folklore into English.
132 Book Review