Centre for Romanian Studies

Gulliver Travels, censored by Ceausescu in 1985L

Ceausescu and Jonathan SWIFT – The Seditious Captain GULLIVER

Surely, the Reverend Jonathan Swift never expected, in his wildest dreams to be ‘excommunicated’ by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu: not that Ceausescu ever read Jonathan Swift! That was not necessary! Ceausescu did not read ANY books at all – he was instead famous  for his semi-literacy and for professing a  distinctly basic vernacular Romanian…
Yet,  amazingly, in spite of such auspicious circumstances, Jonathan Swift managed posthumously to blot his copybook with the Communist dictator… Read on the problems encountered by an editor in Bucharest in the 1980s who tried to publish Swift”s Satyres:

Publishing Swift’s satires in 1985, I myself fought a lot with the censor in order to include “A Modest proposal” concerning eating Irish children, which had become subversive here on account of meat shortage in Romania. Faced with the alternative of not publishing the book at all, or doing it without the famous text, I gave it up.  The supreme level of censorship was a department of the (Communist) Party Central Committee.

The First Edition of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan SWIFT (1726)

Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726. Though it has often been mistakenly thought of as a children’s book, it is a great satire of the times. Gulliver’s Travels is a misanthropic anatomy of human nature; a sardonic looking-glass. It asks its readers to refute it, to deny that it has not adequately characterized human nature and society. Each of the 4 books has a different theme, but all are attempts to deflate human pride. Critics hail the work as a satiric reflection on the failings of Enlightenment modernism.

NOTE: If you wish to find out more about absurdist  censorship practiced by Communist dictatorship in Romania, order: “Blouse Roumaine, the Unsung Voices of Romanian Women”

http://www.blouseroumaine.com