sheepskeleton:

ok, I already promissed this post to i-want-my-iwtv and I was discussing it today with hedonistbyheart, 

Thank you and hedonistbyheart​ so much for doing this! ❤ Sorry I’m gonna stab it with mostly Lestat reaction gifs, I just haven’t made enough for anyone else… And really I think he would be offended on Armand’s behalf so… WHATEVER.

so the time has come to rant about an unbelivable censorship of Polish translation of The Vampire Armand. 
I’m sitting with three versions of TVA: Polish translation from 2007, English original and Italian copy from 2006 for comparison (tho my Italian is not good enough to draw any significant conclusions). 
warning: nsfw stuff. And lots of sarcasm.

So, what happens when you compare Polish book with the English one? Fascinating things! There are whole paragraphs missing! The body parts change into different parts! The description gets so vague you have no idea what actually happend! And all of that pulled off just to hide the GAY. 
Can you believe that Polish translator tried (and tried really hard, I give him that) to make TVA less gay?? 

It’s hard to decide where to start. Let’s take the (in)famous whipping scene. No way, you would think? There is no possible way to censor THAT one? Oh there is. Three subsequent paragraphs of Marius licking Amadeo’s wounds? Gone. Never happend. This is more than a half of a page missing. Two paragraphs of a handjob? Somehow shortened to one vague sentence. Amadeo’s ass slapped? No, surely no. It was his back. Probably around his shoulderblades, for all I can tell from that masterpiece of a translation. 

There is so much sense in slapping someone’s back, isn’t it? Lengthy descriptions of both of them wirtling, moaning etc? Shortened. Why write 4 complex sentences when you can say it in two words? 

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” as they say. Pffffft.

There are also missing paragraphs and sentences from random scenes. That two lines where Amadeo literally spreads his legs? (”I sank into the satin quilted down beneath him; I opened my legs and let my knees caress him, numbed and vibrating from the graze of his knuckles against my lips.”) Gone. Simply gone. There is no trace of it. 

Which is especially bad because it implies some measure of consent from Armand, right? We don’t need that. 

But what about the brothel scenes? Could they censor them too? Oh yes, they could and they did. You get the information that he went there and that he apparently enjoyed himself. But what happend??? the description gets so vague it’s like everything drowned in the smoke of the mentioned pipe. Part about having sex between two skilled lovers? (”Captive between two skilled and willful lovers, I was pierced and suckled, pummeled and emptied until I slept as soundly as ever I had without the Master’s magic at home”) Marked part is gone, the first part of the sentence change into “slept”. Sex in the brothels, no that’s too much for a poor translator, we better get rid of that. He went there to sleep and eat good food, that’s why you go to the brothel, no? Ok, someone actually kissed him. Uh oh.

But brothel means they had BROTH, right? Like soup?

Weird? I tell you one more curious thing. In the very ancient Polish edition of TotBT there is Nicolas mentioned in one sentence as Lestat’s lover and guess what? He is somehow turned into a woman. Nicki is a “she”. The amount of denial is too damn high! 

I wonder how different anything would have been if Nicki really had been a “she.”

I look into the Italian translation of TVA and it seems to be spot on. It sounds even sexier, but maybe it’s just the way Italian sounds in general 😉 All sentences are in place, even when Anne repeats herself in the description, the translation follows. 

ouo good.

If am not mistaken the 2007 Polish edition is just a reprint from much older one, from the 90′. And I sit here, with these three books and I wonder, what is the reason for that disaster? Was this censorship intentional? Or the trouble is much simpler? Is this the fact that the translator was a guy, and that he apparently couldn’t bring himself to write down such gay paragraphs? Or he did write them and then the editor cut the most inapropriate parts? Were they this homophobic for real? 
Whatever the reason, I cringe at every sentence. And then I look at the real masterpiece of translation that is Polish version of Cry to Heaven, this one translated by a woman, and I want to weep over TVA.  

Wow, interesting that one was less mutilated. When was Cry To Heaven translated? I bet the censorship rules changed. But then again, I recall TVA as being more ghey than CtH…

I wonder whether AR is aware of this, bc she strenuously objects to any editing of the English editions. STRENUOUSLY. Kudos to her commitment to her vision.