Pablo Neruda’s Canto General during the McCarthy Years in the US Penelope Johnson* School of Modern Languages & Cultures Durham University Elvet Riverside, New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK Received 04.11.2014, received in revised form 09.12.2014, accepted 26.01.2015 Translations are a form of rewriting, together with criticism, anthologies, historiography, text books, reference works, etc., all of which construct images of writers and/or their works (Bassnett and Lefevere 1998:10). <...> Factors of a sociopolitical, ideological and/or literary nature infl uence this image construction process. <...> This paper has two main aims: to explore to what extent ideological factors play a role in the image construction process and to ascertain to what extent these images are the result of complying with or going against the dominant ideology of the target culture at the time of publication. <...> These aims will be achieved by using as a case study the translations into English of Canto general by the Chilean laureate poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) published in the US in 1950. <...> These images existed side by side with the realities they competed with, but the images always tended to reach more people than the corresponding realities did, and they most certainly do so now. (Lefevere 1992:5) According to Lefevere (1985, 1992, 1982/2000) translations are a form of rewriting, together with criticism, anthologies, historiography, text books, reference works, etc., all of which construct images of writers and/ or their works (Bassnett and Lefevere 1998:10). <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: penelope.johnson@durham.ac.uk # 229 # or poetological currents’ in any particular culture and the power wielded by the emerging images is enormous (Lefevere 1992: 5). <...> On the one hand, they may comply with pre-existing conceptions that the target culture might have of the source culture, thus reinforcing such conceptions. <...> Pablo Neruda’s Canto General during. the other hand, they may refute and threaten target culture preconceptions to the point of either changing these conceptions, or of being rejected and marginalised by readers, critics and so on. <...> Factors of a sociopolitical, ideological and/or literary nature infl uence this image construction process. <...> This paper focuses on ideological factors and has two main aims: to explore to what extent ideological factors play a role in the image construction <...>