but
fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there,
imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of
Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even
if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It
was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it
either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday
action, or was already orthodox (goodthinkful would be the Newspeak
expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before
approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary
literature could only be subjected to ideological translation -- that is,
alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known
passage from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable
rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving
their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of
Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People
to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government...

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while
keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing
so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink.
A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby
Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being
transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to
preserve the memory of certai