On Censorship And Adaptive Translation | Cancer Ward by A. Solzhenitsyn

Not so long ago I've read Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and there was one particular dialogue that I really liked. In fact, I liked it so much that I wanted it to be my first post in the Dissecting Literature series. I've read the book in Russian so I needed to either translate the quote into English myself, which would have been easier and quicker, or try to find the English version of this quote. And here's the fun part. When I tried looking for some quotes in English, it turned out that the dialogue I had in mind is quite different in translation and for whatever reason two pages longer.

At first I thought that it could be due to censorship, but some parts in the English version made me think that it might also be the translator's attempt at adapting the book for the western reader.

So what it's all about

The quote in question is the dialogue from chapter 30 The Old Doctor, where they're talking about the free healthcare system. I've found the English version of the quote on Goodreads and here's what it looks like.

“That’s all very well, but how many family doctors would you need? It simply doesn’t fit into the system of a free universal national health service.”

“It’ll fit into a universal national health service, but it won’t fit into a free health service,” said Oreshchenkov, rumbling on and clinging confidently to his point. 

“But it’s our greatest achievement, the fact that it’s a free service.” 

“Is this, in fact, such a great achievement? What does ‘free’ mean? The doctors don’t work for nothing, you know. It only means that they’re paid out of the national budget and the budget is supported by patients. It isn’t free treatment, it’s depersonalized treatment. If a patient kept the money that pays for his treatments, he would have turned the ten roubles he has to spend at the doctor’s over and over in his hands. He could go to the doctor five times over if he really needed to.”

It starts out the same as in the original but starting from the forth paragraph the translator (as I suspect) started adding his own five cents to the discussion.

And it goes on like this for another two pages. The old doctor ruminates on the problematic free healthcare system and at some point says "And for the clinics that do charge fees, the turnover's even faster than in the others." which makes little sense in the context of Soviet Union.

That's not how it works! That's not how any of it works!

From what I know, "clinics that charge fees" was a big "no-no" in the Soviet Union. I've asked my parents about it and they agreed that it's absurd. And even if there were private clinics, those were for the elite. No one would go there just to get "a chit a certificate or a sick leave or an invalid's pension card", as it says in the English translation.

Got away with censorship? Beware of translators

I also wasn't able to find any information about the uncensored version of Cancer Ward, and whether some parts of it were censored in the first place. It only says that they were refusing to publish it altogether, and later the book was self-published. As Wikipedia explains, the first English translation was unauthorized and it was published in 1968 by The Bodley Head in the UK, and then by Dial Press in the US. The snippets I've found and used in this blog post are from the UK edition, so I'm not sure if the US version is any different from it.

Why do we read books about other countries anyway?

What really surprizes me is the reasoning behind this changes. That is, I have no idea why would they feel the need to do something like this. This surprizes me in every translation that is adapted for the target audience to the point of loosing it's original purpose. I always believed that the whole point of reading a book about a different country is to learn about these differences. In my opinion this is especially true for books like Cancer Ward.

I'm very lucky to know several foreign langueges and be able to read many books the way authors have intended them to be. That's what I appreciate most about books. A book speaks from its author's heart and experiences. I want to hear that voice, not muffled by translator's attempt to make it easier for me to understand (thank you for treating me like a narrow-minded idiot who can't tell one country form another). And what would be even worse, put his own opinions on the matter into the translation.

Dear Translators! Please stop ruining good books with cultural adaptation.


This started out as a post about book translations and turned into a little rant. Sorry about that! I feel strongly about misinforming the readers. And that's exactly what adaptive translation does in my opinion.

Tell me how do you feel about that in the comments!