Books by children’s author Roald Dahl are being revised to remove material that might be offensive to current generations of children.
Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work.
Edits have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”.
Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added. But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
…Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People.
Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”.
I am bracing myself for the outrage from right-wingers that classic works are being destroyed by the forces of political correctness and that the gender fascists are indoctrinating children against men. Remember how they got hot and bothered when the estate of Dr Seuss withdrew certain titles because they felt that they were not in keeping with current sentiments? This article in National Review has already started the process.
But there are people making more nuanced criticisms of these changes.
PEN America, a community of 7,500 writers that advocates for freedom of expression, said it was “alarmed” by reports of the changes to Dahl’s books.
“If we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society,” tweeted Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America.
Laura Hackett, a childhood Dahl fan who is now deputy literary editor of London’s Sunday Times newspaper, had a more personal reaction to the news.
“The editors at Puffin should be ashamed of the botched surgery they’ve carried out on some of the finest children’s literature in Britain,” she wrote. “As for me, I’ll be carefully stowing away my old, original copies of Dahl’s stories, so that one day my children can enjoy them in their full, nasty, colourful glory.”
The people who own the rights to these books explain the process and the reasoning behind this move.
The Roald Dahl Story Company has said any edits to have come from its review process, which has been ongoing since 2020, were “small and carefully considered”.
His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman told BBC Radio 4 that Dahl’s books “should be allowed to fade away” rather than be changed if they are deemed offensive.
“If Dahl offends us, let him go out of print,” said Pullman. “Read all these [other] wonderful authors who are writing today, who don’t get as much of a look-in because of the massive commercial gravity of people like Roald Dahl.”
But poet and author Debjani Chatterjee believes it is “a very good thing that the publishers are reviewing his work”.
She told the BBC World Service: “I think it’s been done quite sensitively. Take the word ‘fat’. They’ve used ‘enormous’. If anything, I actually think ‘enormous’ is even funnier.”
Publishers and owners of copyright have a financial interest in not letting the books ‘fade away’ as Pullman recommends. Publishers would like every generation to continue buying them and the only way that can happen if the books change. For example, I would never buy books for my grandchildren, however famous those books are or how much I loved them as a child, if they contain racist, sexist, classist, antisemitic language or express other forms of bigotry in language or ideas.
What about the idea that the author’s vision is what matters and that should be preserved? That is a valid point but authors do change their views over time and I suspect that they would revise their works if they could. I know I would. If I had the chance, I would revise all of my published books because I feel I could have written some things more clearly or I have a new perspective on some topics. It is possible that if Dahl were still alive, the changed ethos would have made him write more closely to the revised works because few authors, unless they seek to be provocative, would want to annoy or insult readers. As a result, some defenders of the changes have suggested that Dahl would have approved of the new versions, though trying to infer the intentions of dead people is an exercise fraught with peril.
Back in 2007, I wrote a post titled Is Dumbledore gay? in response to author J. K. Rowling saying that she had always conceived of Dumbledore as gay though she did not make that explicit in the books. This too aroused some controversy as to whether her post-publication expressions should carry any weight at all, even if she were the creator of the character. One point of view is that once a work is published, the author’s control over the story is over. If there are editions that were revised by the author, then the latest revision should be deemed the canonical one.
But even that is not so simple. In that same post, I wrote about Marcel Proust, author of In Search of Lost Time, who kept revising his work and delaying submitting it for publication so that in the end it was published posthumously. But even after that, a major further revision was discovered among his papers.
In 1987, long after Proust’s death, one of his original publishers issued a revised version of Proust’s novel based on an original manuscript in which Proust seemed, just before his death, to have deleted a huge 250 page chunk out of one of the novels. This posed a dilemma for Proust readers. Which was the ‘real’ novel: The longer version that had long been considered the canonical one? Or the 1987 abridged version that seemed to represent Proust’s ‘final’ thoughts on his own work?
Most Proust scholars, but not all, think that what was originally published should be the final word.
Even taking the author’s latest version, whether published or unpublished, as the canonical one is not without problems. Take Charles Darwin’s major work On the Origin of Species. People cite this work all the time but there were six editions of this book. Which edition should be treated as the canonical one? Each edition had revisions made by Darwin in the light of new information and in response to criticisms of his work. As a result of those criticisms, Darwin’s later editions were more equivocal, hedging and qualifying his central thesis and making it harder to penetrate his meaning. Later scientific work invalidated many of the bases of those criticisms so that noted evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (who provides a new introduction to a facsimile reprint of the first edition) recommends that people buy a facsimile of the first edition (which I did) as it represents Darwin’s clearest exposition of his theory, even though it was not his last word on the topic. So here we have a situation where a writer’s earlier edition is preferred.
A case can be made that there should be greater leeway in revising children’s books because children do not know the original and they cannot miss what they are unaware of. It is the nostalgia of older people that is being affected by changes in children’s books. Books that are aimed at adults are less of a concern.
Last year my young grandchildren came to visit and in preparation, I went to the local library and borrowed a large number of books to read to them while they were here. I picked out from the children’s section books whose titles were familiar to me as classics and whose authors were famous, some of which I had read as a child, without actually reading them again, When I actually started reading to the books to the children, I was startled to find disturbing passages with elements of racism, sexism, colorism, classicism, even cannibalism. Several times, I had to find some excuse to stop in the middle of the reading and do something else with them. I would not borrow those books again in their current form, so these books may end up being just for adults who are nostalgic for their own childhood.
My grandchildren are coming this year for another visit and this time I am going to read every book all the way through before I check them out.
Fixed it for you. The idea that any language in a Dahl book would be offensive to children is hilarious.
Thus missing out on the opportunity to discuss how much the world has changed, why it changed, why it needed to change, and why it can still get better.
Those passages presumably didn’t disturb you as a child. Do you think reading them then harmed you? Do you think you’re protecting them by not reading to them things you read as a child? If yes, then fair enough, they’re your family.
There is of course a word for this practice: Bowdlerisation. I had always taken that term as something that was generally regarded among intelligent people as a bad thing.
In this case, of course, it’s all about the money. Dahl’s relatives want to keep milking it for as long as possible, and they’ve already had to quietly trot out an apology for old grandad’s virulent and unrepentent anti-semitism. Defacing some of his books so they can keep selling them is of a piece with that.
This seems to be exactly the sort of thing the right-wing reactionaries want us to be angry about. And a lot of them are very angry. Which is why I wholeheartedly support it. People moaning about others trying to make the world a kinder, less oppressive, less bigoted place are just pathetic in every sense.
So, good for the Dahl estate on that score. Fortunately I don’t really know any right-wing idiot children, but I have heard so many much less obnoxious people witter on about how it’s “important to preserve history, so we can learn from it”, or to “keep the original author’s world view intact as a matter of historical record”. Why can’t children be exposed to the bigotry of the past in order to see how much we’ve changed, they say. And, yes, there is certainly a place in society for teaching children about past bigotries. But that place is not in silly books about flying fruit and magical chocolate factories.
The thing is, what most parents want is nice, exciting stories, packed with irreverent silliness, to entertain and enthral their children. And they’d rather not have offensive material in those stories if possible. So this is a fair solution, and should be an entirely unremarkable one. It’s silly stories for kids, not Camus’ meditations on the futility of existence or Boccacio’s Decameron. Scholars of children’s literature will quite easily be able to obtain the original editions to study for cultural history purposes, but children’s books of this sort are not meant to be consumed as exercises in literary criticism. I think there is, however, a very real and very strong moral burden on children’s literature not to normalise and justify bigotry. Particularly as children are not well equipped to see the problems when bigotry is presented to them as normal, unremarkable and assumed.
So we end up with a balancing act between allowing those eight year olds who want to the opportunity to conduct a moral analysis of late 20th century values with original texts and preventing the recreation of bigoted attitudes from the past in new generations. While I feel for those primary school ethical philosophers thwarted in their academic ambitions, I’m good with prioritising the needs of the many.
Pullman has a point though -- this has been brought on by capitalism’s need to sell products. It would be much better if people just bought new books by living authors who could use the money, and thereby encouraged more writing talent to flourish.
“If Dahl offends us, let him go out of print,” said Pullman. “Read all these [other] wonderful authors who are writing today, who don’t get as much of a look-in because of the massive commercial gravity of people like Roald Dahl.”
Exactly this. There are PLENTY of people alive today who would be happy to write new books for children. So if the Dahl publishing company are willing to pay people to edit what’s been written, why not pay new authors to write new stuff, and thus continue to profit instead of being stuck with a long-dead author and fading away with him? That sounds to me like a win all around.
She told the BBC World Service: “I think it’s been done quite sensitively. Take the word ‘fat’. They’ve used ‘enormous’. If anything, I actually think ‘enormous’ is even funnier.”
So…they’ve found a funnier way to make fun of fat people? Not sure how that’s an improvement…
Dahl changed the Oompa-Loompas fairly radically between the 1964 and 1973 editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in response to criticisms that his original depiction of them as black African pygmies who were paid in cocoa beans (and happy with it) was racist. In his own words:
sonofrojblake:
I don’t think it’s that straight-forward. The problem with Bowdlerisation in its orginal context is that if you take the bawdy jokes and so on out of Shakespeare, you’re left with something which is very, very different. Those elements were an essential part of what Shakespeare was doing (hell, you could argue that in some places they were the main point, and everything else around them was just set-up), and you can’t remove them without drastically altering the work. I’m not at all convinced that the modifications we’re talking about here have anything like the same import. Is it really important to the artistic merit of the work whether Mrs Twit is specifically “ugly and beastly” rather than merely “beastly”? Is there some critical element that’s lost by excising that one word?
Of course, it’s impossible for me to say for certain since I haven’t actually read the revised versions… But a lot of this feels like performative outrage over something that’s really not very important, with a large helping of “so-and-so have ruined my childhood!!! (by slightly altering something I haven’t watched / read in over 30 years)”.
sonofrojblake @#2,
Cartomancer @#2 has answered this much better than I can. There are so many examples of prejudice and bigotry that exist now all around us that can be used as teaching moments that we do not need old books to find opportunities to discuss them.
No, they didn’t and that is precisely the problem. They just created and fed into extant prejudices. Weaning myself away from them required effort as an adult which is why I now view such things with distaste.
Yes, because they helped normalize those abhorrent views in my child’s mind. I am now shocked that I did not pick up on them then but that is with the benefit of hindsight and an adult’s sensibilities.
Yes, I do. There were so many things that I did as a child and that my parents let me do because we were simply not aware that they were bad. The idea that the things one did as a child automatically makes them suitable for the next generation of children is an absurd argument. I would hope that adults would learn from their own experience and from improved knowledge in general to make the world a better and safer place for children.
…this has been brought on by capitalism’s need to sell products.
No, it’s been brought on by some companies’ cowardice, rigid mindsets, and inability to handle the risk of taking on new authors. Which, hopefully, will be corrected by a newer company or three taking the risk and reaping the reward out from under the old ones.
When seeking appropriate children’s books, asking the children’s librarian for recommendations is surprisingly helpful.
In fairness to those older authors, there is a reason that some of their books became popular. They were good storytellers who knew how to grab children’s imaginations. But those books were good despite their shortcomings, not because of them. Removing or revising those parts that we now consider offensive would still preserve the qualities that made the books popular in the first place.
Raging Bee, #6,
And a reticence to back new, unknown, authors whose work has not yet been demonstrated to shift high volumes is unrelated to capitalism how exactly? Perhaps if the calculus was less in terms of risk-reward and profit we’d see more support for up and coming authors.
What Pullman said.
Hopefully the new editions mention on the cover somewhere that these are amended from the original; it would be dishonest to pass off this modern version as his own. Dishonest, and unhelpful -- children are not helped by the pretence that older authors met the political and linguistic norms of today.
I’m also not convinced there is a need to make these changes in order to save the kids from bad attitudes. If I can grow up to oppose racism despite reading Enid Blyton’s Golliwog books as a child, I think we can conclude the influence of those books was lost amongst the greater experience of living in the world and rubbing shoulders with multitudes.
Which is strange given the thrust of anti-fatphobia campaigns was to de-stigmatise the word. Removal does the opposite, reinforcing that is to be avoided as a slur.
So in other words, capitalism’s need to sell products. Why make risky investments in new authors when established named are reliable sellers?
@mano, 5:
Yeah fair enough, good answer.
@Dunc, 4:
Oh that, definitely. What’s a bit different in this particular case is that there appear to be thoughtful, non-rightwingnutjob types coming out against doing it. I mean -- Pullman is against doing it, although what he means by “leave those books alone” is in this case “buy mine instead”.
@cartomancer, 2:
So much this. My two-and-a-half year old boy is currently demanding this every night: https://www.booktrust.org.uk/book/f/frockodile/
Holms @11:
We ‘need’ (or perhaps want) to make these changes for the following reasons, at the very least:
-- So that children who are members of the group being affected by the description can enjoy the books too. (Ask Jewish people about their experience of reading, er large parts of European canon, basically. As an adult you are prepared, but a child….)
-- So that adults can read the books to children without appearing to endorse the bigotry.
-- So that adults can read the books to children as a fun read, without having to stop every few sentences for commentary.
I read all the Tarzan books as a young teenager 50-something years ago and was too naïve to notice much wrong with them.
If they were edited to meet current standards, there would be noting but prepositions and punctuation.
I tend to agree with Pullman. Sure, you can replace “fat” with “enormous,” but is the problem the word, or the treatment of someone’s appearance as something to be ridiculed? See Dudley from Harry Potter for another example of this.
I read Curious George as a child, and came back to it when I had my own kids. There is smoking, which didn’t really bother me too much. Then there is the casual imperialism that is just beneath the surface of the entire book. Curious George was, for me, a fascinating window on the mentality of western Europeans in the 30s, but that is not something that can be easily edited out of the book. I am not sure that it is worth trying. If the underlying sentiments are offensive, you have to rewrite much of the story to get around them. And for what? To rehabilitate an old story that currently offers a window into its time and the society that produced it, and hope that you have eradicated the offensiveness instead of just changing terms to ones that might look equally bad in 20 years?
As I re-read some of my childhood favorites (books 60-70+ years old) I am appalled at the casual racism in some of them. I don’t remember them that way, but then, at the time, non-white folks were not part of my universe, so those parts just slid by without any real connection to life except they also framed my early education on races. Some books can die, some can be revised. If you don’t like what the current rights-holder does, don’t buy the new version.
https://b3ta.com/challenge/modernisebooks/popular/
chigau @ # 15: … Tarzan books … If they were edited to meet current standards, there would be noting but prepositions and punctuation.
Last year, I plowed my way through Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (via the Gutenberg Project), and was pleasantly surprised at the relatively enlightened treatment given to the Waziris (T’s native allies), most notably --
At the time I’d thought this had been among the last of Burroughs’s books and he had at least attempted to grow with the times, but since found out it was only Tarzan #5, first published in 1916. Perhaps somebody tidied it up before Gutenberg put it online in ’01, though they make no note of any such revised editions.
Mmm… this business of changing or eliding a word here or there makes very little difference in my opinion. Changing the actual story, that’s another thing.
This I do find problematic. If people are adding to or altering the story, they should be credited in the authorship.
(Famously — or, more properly, infamously — Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister edited some of his work after his death to make it more palatable to the Nazi regime, which led people to believe he was anti-semitic)
Quite recently I was bedtime-reading aloud “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865).
My audience/victim agreed with my live snarky inserts and asides on the valorisation of Alice’s carelessly selfish behaviour, privileged attitudes, and thoroughgoing entitlement.
I suspect Lewis Carroll would not have approved this heretical reading. But we had a great time hearing the story again but with a coarse commentary throughout on what really should have happened to the protagonist prig.
I later spoke to a writer who thought they would prefer to re-edit their own work when it becomes an obstacle to telling the story, or to take it out of circulation. If after death, they would welcome a sensitive and honest editor to do so on their behalf.
Not that I think there’s any possible saving of the awful Alice.
It may or may not matter in fiction but I remember that the former Governor-General of Canada, Adrienne Clarkson, was extremely annoyed, that in her memoirs, some editor had changed her description of her father from “fireman” to “firefighter”, completely changing his trade. He was a fireman (stoker?) on a ship, certainly not someone who was going to be putting out fires.
Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added
In the book, Oompah Loompahs are small black men. In the movie with Gene Wilder, they are orange with green hair.
Verruca Salt in both stories demands that her Daddy buy her an Oompah Loompah, and then sings a song called ‘I Want it NOW’.
In the Tim Burton version, there are squirrels which open the walnuts and discard all the bad nuts. Verruca demands a squirrel, and gets tossed down the garbage chute by the squirrels because she is a ‘bad nut’.
Altering problematic details like slavery is not some crime against literature. Augustus Glumph is greedy and probably in danger of diabetes because his parents let him eat his weight in candy. Verruca is a classic spoiled child. The story is about morality. I have no problem letting children watch the Willy Wonka movies, but I would never read them the original book.
Acting as if the original version of a fictional story that features casual racism is somehow sacred dogma that can never be altered is ridiculous.
[meta]
Tethys, heh.
Veruca is a plant (and the character’s name), verruca is a wart.
[I too get names confused at first, then sometimes keep them as an in-joke.
Princess Amygdala in Star Wars, Vulvania in Dr Phibes]
@JM
Congratulations, you caught the joke in her name. Why would you imagine I’m confused by it, since I’ve deliberately spelled it with a doubled R to emphasize the pun?
Giving fictional characters meaningful punny names is not rare. The Addams Family is similarly droll, with Wednesday, Fester, Morticia, Lurch, etc
Because (1) I wrote “I too get names confused”, so that if I do it, I can imagine others also doing it, and (2) how could I possibly know it was a deliberate choice?
But fair enough, it was a deliberate choice on your part.
—
An amusing (to me) anecdote: my wife tutors in English for those poor kids who parents send them to after-school classes, even on weekends.
So, she chose an extract from a children’s book for discussion where the relevant section had a character called “Dick”. This, to 11-year-olds.
You can imagine what ensued. She admits she should have known better.
sonofrojblake, @ #13:
Yes, that’s true -- but as far as I’ve seen, they’re all authors with particularly trenchant views on the subject and a hair-trigger tendency to go off at the slightest whiff of anything that might vaguely resemble censorship (or editorial interference). Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing (we should be careful about this stuff!) and in many cases there’s perfectly good and valid reasons for it -- I completeley understand why Salman Rushdie, for example, is very sensitive on this topic, and I don’t blame him in the least. It does, however, mean that they sometimes (IMHO) over-react to things that aren’t really that big a deal. But I certainly wouldn’t dismiss them out-of-hand.
Again, I’m only going on second-hand reports and old memories, so it may well be that some of the changes truly are egregious… I don’t know. But I’m not persuaded by the idea that the original texts are somehow sacrosanct, and that any modification, no matter how slight, is a crime against literature.
Tethys, @ #23:
Only in the first edition. As mentioned in my comment @ #4, Dahl revised that for the second edition in response to criticism he recieved and decided he agreed with.
Some writers throw the words down, chuck it at the publisher, cash the cheque and move on. Some writers sweat and slave over every comma and regard every finished work as it it were their newborn child. I can understand both impulses. It’s worth acknowledging that Dahl was clearly not a precious snowflake about his stuff, or he’d not have agreed to the changes he made in “Chocolate Factory” already. Guessing how dead people would react to stuff happening now is a fool’s errand, but the available data would suggest that at the very least Dahl wouldn’t have knee-jerk-rejected the suggestion of changes.
Tethys @23
This was also in the book edition that was in my school in 1973-4, as well as the version my son read circa 2005.
@anat
The Gene Wilder film had geese laying golden eggs, and Veruca being judged a ‘bad egg’ rather than a bad nut.
I’ve not watched the whole remake because I am averse to Johnny Depp, but the cgi squirrel scene is amusing! Entitled brat and her entitled parents down the trash chute is the key takeaway in all versions.
I don’t think the story suffered at all by changing Oompah Loompahs from African Pygmy’s to orange skinned and green haired people.
Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a definite case of ‘they’re all canonical’… Adams wrote the radio show, he wrote the books, he did the scripts for the old TV show, and he was the primary scriptwriter for the movie (even if the movie wasn’t finished until after he died). Every single one of those took most of the same basic concepts but tweaked them or put them in a different order.
In some cases the changes were just due to different media needing things handled differently, and in some it was just ‘I wasted a really good opportunity in the first run, let me fix that’.
I don’t think the story suffered at all by changing Oompah Loompahs from African Pygmy’s to orange skinned and green haired people.
Well, as long as they’re orange AND green, they’ll be evenhandedly offensive to both factions in Northern Ireland…definitely an improvement…
Im ok if people change some books and Im ok if they dont -.Besides Bill Watterson is going to have a new work out! Who cares about Roald Dahl!
I still read Enid Blyton to my kids (The Five Find Outers) and had to explain why “Fatty” wasnt probably a good choice of a name for the character. On the other hand they have been learning “Your Momma so fat ” jokes in school from their peers so most of it feels like a wasted exercise -- the more I frown the more they do it.
Asterix and Obelix are one those that I really love and which I let my children read though re-reading them now makes me wonder about some of the themes (but those puns!). recently the druids name changed from Getafix to Panoramix did not please me! (The irony of Asterix and other names originating in French is to be ignored ofcourse).
Nominative prejudice?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fats#People_with_the_nickname_%22Fats%22
—
Oh, yeah:
And, FWIW:
“Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the “euphemism cycle” in 1974″
Finally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill
—
Thing is, conceptualising something is indeed easier if there’s a word or idiom for it, but modifying language to prevent certain conceptualisations is fraught.
cf. newspeak
Sacrosanct, like the oft revised Bible?
😉
@ 27 Morales
I take it you’re unaware that literally some of the most popular children’s books in English featured a character of that name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_and_Jane
@ 11 Holms
… by which Holms means oppose racism but having no problem with racist caricatures persisting in children’s books. In other words, not actually opposing racism.
@ 14 anat
Everything in this excellent comment. “This” as the kids say.
Silentbob, you are incorrect.
Not only am I aware of it, but so is my wife.
It just didn’t register when she was preparing her lesson. 🙂
That’s why it was amusing; I repeat: “She admits she should have known better.”
(Also, whether or not I were unaware of it at the time she told me is irrelevant; it was her lesson, not mine)
#38 sbob
I trust you have textual evidence for claiming I “[have] no problem with racist caricatures persisting in children’s books”…?
Deepak @#34,
I too read Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers books as a child. I do remember one thing that bothered me even then was the way that one working class boy (his name was Ern Goon, the son of the local policeman, if I remember correctly) was made a figure of ridicule. It smacked of classicism, though I did not know that word at the time.
@Mano Singham
Yeah there is quite a lot to dislike and I did weigh the choice between introducing Enid Blyton or not but ultimately decided that it was ok . there are other clear instances where when there is something dangerous the boys will tell the girls to stay behind etc. Still Enid Blyton was easier to explain than Asterix and Obelix (What are orgies?)
I think growing up in India most of the TV serials / Books were British and so that classism/racism was kind of expected and accepted -Mind your language stands out .
Revisionism is the domain of the Left.
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Now, are we going to paint over the works of Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, van Gogh, Da Vinci?
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Now, are we going to rewrite the musical scores of composers such as Mozart, Bach, Chopin?
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Better get on rewriting opera lyrics and opera musical scores!!! Opera is infused in White Supremacy!!!
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It is arrogant to rewrite some author’s work. Yes, authors sometimes rewrite their work (fiction, non-fiction): first edition differs fron second edition, etc.. Leave the rewriting to the authors themselves. If the authors are dead, leave their work as such.
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When I buy an author’s work, I want the genuine article, not something adulterated by leftist revisionism.
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Languages change in time. Cultures change with time. The meaning of a word may change with time. Try reading Chaucer in its original form; one needs to translate Old English to Current English. Ideally, Chaucer is to be presented to current readership in both Old and Current English. To remain truthful, state what you are selling is a translation, a modification, not the original and genuine work. And the translation should be as close to the original (the author’s) meaning, not some leftist revisionist view.
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Sanity still exists in the publishing world: Danish and French publishers refuse to change a word of Roald Dahl’s work.
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It is naive to think that if children were raised in a so-called bigotry-free environment, said children will grow up to be bigotry-free adults. Wishful fantasy!!! One just switches from one bigotry to another bigotry. Good and Evil are integral parts of human nature. Children are very innovative, very imaginative by themselves in the areas of Good and Evil. Naive parents think that if their children express an Evil Thought it is solely because a Third Party introduced said Evil Thought to the innocent minds of their beloved children. Proper parents should be having continuous dialogs with their children, continuously exchanging interpretations with their children, evaluating if the world-views of their children are compatible with theirs. Can Mr Singham assure us he is bigotry-free? Talking about implicit, unconscious, subconscious bigotry of the Left.
I never fail to be amused by friedfishe’s ignorance; this is a commercial decision by the publishers in pursuit of greater profitability.
IOW, a decision made on economic grounds, not on ideological grounds. They kinda want to sell more stuff, quite understandably.
(I suppose that to an ideologue, all decisions are ideological)
Aww, I can’t resist one more retort:
Quite strongly exhibited in that comment by the friedfishe; here we have capitalism at work, in the form of private enterprise leveraging its intellectual property to increase profit, and yet the inference made is that’s it’s because of “the Left”.
Heh.
@ 41 Holms
Elementary my dear Holms -- # 11 Holms
When one eliminates all the alternatives, one is confronted with what remains: Not making changes means the past persisting. The conclusion is inescapable. Anything else confusing you dear fellow?
(Anyone else disturbed by how this guy’s nym makes them turn into Nigel Bruce?)
😉
#47 sbob
You realise that was in reply to a post about changes to Dahl’s work, right? And then the Golliwogs were introduced to the conversation to make a further point.
Hey idiot, you can’t change the past. A rewrite is merely an attempt to pretend the attitudes of the past were other than what they were. The various stories featuring golliwogs will always be stories that feature golliwogs, and the best option is to not publish them.
What are you on about? My handle doesn’t change me into anything. I’ll grant you that it sounds the same as Holmes, but the origin is entirely separate. Note the spelling.
But even then… having noticed the similarity, why on Earth would you be “disturbed” by the apparent link to the character? And then why would you jump from that character to the actor playing a different character from that work??
Not just children’s books, apparently.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/27/james-bond-novels-to-be-reissued-with-racial-references-removed
@ ^
I take it you mean also adolescent’s books?
@50: snob.
The Canterbury Tales are not a single book, nor are they written in Old English. There are 84 manuscripts and multiple incunable which contain various versions of Chaucer’s tale.
Editing is not a leftist conspiracy, despite the silly fish having conniptions about changing a word.
Wiki-
Copyright and plagiarism weren’t considerations in the production of medieval manuscripts.
@44: “ChatGPT, yell at a cloud about people changing children’s books to be less insulting.”