Since the restricted readership of limited editions at least theoretically excludes those who might need protection because of their youth or their social status, their translators rarely express concern about these other readers--- with a few notable exceptions. In the preface to his translation of Apuleius' Golden Ass, Francis Byrne attacks expurgation, while ostensibly accepting the practice of keeping taboo texts altogether from the young:

Books which describe life as it really is should be kept altogether from any young persons, whom it may be deemed desirable to keep in ignorance of the part played by sexual desire in the general scheme of life. There is an abundance of other literature for them to form their taste upon. Let them study such poets and writers of fancy as are suited to the early stages of life. And let them have no Gil Blas, no Tom Jones, no Tristram Shandy, no Golden Ass, and of course, no Old Testament.

But imagine the folly of handing these books to the unwise in such truncated and mutilated form that their motive is obscured and their language pointless, at the same time representing them as the productions of genius! What is the result of such commendation to the young mind? A feeling of utter bewilderment in the first place, and then, as knowledge arrives, a sense of indignation at the unworthy trick which has been played at their expense by those who are older, and should have been wiser, than themselves.

The ironies of Byrne's first paragraph ('no Old Testament') give way to indignation in his second, an indignation not only on behalf of the deceived and bewildered reader, but also on behalf of the mutilated text. Indeed, just as with bowdlerizing translators of the classics, concern for the reader is here closely linked to a concern that the classic text be represented to the reader in such a way as to maintain its status as a respected work of literature. But where the bowdlerizing translator insists that only through expurgation can the text's true nature and true worth be conveyed to the general reader, translators such as Byrne see expurgation as destructive of the fundamental elements that make the text 'a production of genius'.

Byrne's choice of language here ('truncated and mutilated') finds echoes in other translators, some of whom reject such mutilation by expurgation specifically as a mode of castration. The anonymous translator of the version of Aristophanes privately printed for the Athenian Society (1912) declares that 'no faithful translator will emasculate his author by expurgation' (19), and Leonard Smithers, who edited Richard Burton's posthumous Catullus and wrote the prose versions and notes that accompany Burton's verse translations, says that he has 'aimed at producing a readable translation, and yet as literal a version (castrating no passages) as the dissimilarity in idiom of the two languages, Latin and English, permit?' And in spite of the fact that James Cranstoun's own translation is, although complete, thoroughly euphemistic, he makes use of the same image in objecting to those who 'excise' the obscene poems of Catullus: 'His expressions, it is true, are often intensely sensuous, sometimes even grossly licentious, but to obliterate these and to clothe him in the garb of purity would be to misrepresent him entirely. He would be Atys, not Catullus?' Cranstoun sees those who refuse to translate the obscene poems as rendering Catullus (like the Attis of his own poem 63) a eunuch. The obscenity that bowdlerizing translators often regard as threatening our understanding of the true virtues of the classic text may thus for those who reject expurgation be a constitutive element of the text's power, conceived of as essentially virile. Cranstoun's other image, that of the garb of purity, suggests that this virility must be neither excised nor obscured; the metaphor of clothing also occurs in Burton's contrast between the Catullus of other translators, who dress 'the toga'd citizen' in the costume of today', and his own presentation, which apparently strips away even the toga: As discovery is mostly my mania, I have hit upon a bastard-urging to indulge it, by a presenting to the public of certain classics in the nude Roman poetry, like the Arab, and of the same date...'

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