The Dreams of A Spanish Patriot: Alfredo Marqueríe’s Fascist Version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1963)

Abstract

Shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the widow of one of the introducers of Ibsen to the Spanish stage, Josep Maria Jord a, applied for a censorship approval for two of her husband’s Ibsen translations: Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House. The first was prohibited on moral grounds, the second because it was in Catalan (AGA: Box 73/08262, File 1465/40 and File 1464/ 40). These were the first two Ibsen translations to be banned during Francisco Franco’s long dictatorship (1939–1975), several other would follow. Jord a, however, had engaged in yet another Ibsen play, namely An Enemy of the People, which he translated both into Spanish and Catalan. His widow never tried to get these translations approved, probably because, in the fin de si ecle period, the play had been popular among the left, and often staged by amateur groups linked to the labor movement (G omez-Baggethun 2020, 58–81, 99–103). In fact, the last time An Enemy of the People was produced in Spain before the Civil War was in 1920, when it was staged in Madrid on the occasion of the annual conference of the socialist trade union UGT. Although it is not surprising that Jord a’s widow was discouraged, she might have misjudged the situation. The truth is that An Enemy of the People never encountered any problems with the Francoist censorship. Although no one applied for a staging censorship approval of the play during the 1940s and 1950s, An Enemy of the People was frequently published during these two decades. And when the play finally returned to the