I don’t know how to ask this correctly but I’ll try to explain. So I have a Georgian translated copy of “Animal Farm” by George Orwell and it has preface written by some guy where he explains the plot and symbolisms behind every animal and comes to a conclusion that basically says how “totalitarianism bad”(which I agree) but mostly “socialism bad” and how “this book should have been published before teenagers started wearing portraits of Che Guevera and romanticise revolution”. On my first read years ago I didn’t think much about it but I picked up again and something seemed off when I read it.
Now politics aside and whether you agree with socialism or not, I find this very disingenuous and wrong considering Orwell was an ACTUAL socialist till his death and everything that he has written was “against totalitarianism”. “Homage to Catalonia” is a big evidence of it where he went to Spain during the civil war to fight on the side of anarchists. It’s how people always use 1984 as some kind of example forgetting the actual beliefs of the writer and what they stood for.
Either this was done on purpose or the guy who wrote it hasn’t read basic biography about him.
by ReddestPainser
2 Comments
If they have the rights to it, a publisher can hire someone to provide whatever spin they want. Look at a lot of 19th century Russian Literature. You can find ten different translations, every one of them a different preface.
I don’t read prefaces on purpose. I don’t need anyone to test the water for me before I get in the tub.
> I find this very disingenuous and wrong considering Orwell was an ACTUAL socialist till his death and everything that he has written was “against totalitarianism”
He *was* suspicious of communism, though, to the point of drawing up a [“snitch list”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list) of people he suspected were crypto-communists or sympathetic to the ideology (there’s context, but you can decide how it affects this).