This variant of inclusiveness will not cross the Channel.
Roald Dahl's French publisher, Gallimard, said on Tuesday that it intended to leave the texts of the children's books by this British author intact, despite the rewriting in English at the initiative of the rights holders.
“This rewrite only affects Great Britain.
We have never modified the texts of Roald Dahl, and to date it is not planned
, ”a spokeswoman for Gallimard Jeunesse told AFP.
The affair was revealed on Friday by a conservative British daily, the
Daily Telegraph
.
The rights holders have undertaken to smooth the language of all the children's novels by the beloved author of several generations.
The Puffin editions (Penguin Random House group) will now publish a different text from the original.
Read alsoThe books of Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, rewritten because deemed “offensive”
"When reprinting books written years ago, it's not unusual to review the language used and update other things like the cover and the layout," the holder said
. -word of the company that manages the work, Roald Dahl Story Company.
The number of modified terms is vast, touching on issues considered sensitive: race and ethnicity, gender, weight, physical appearance, mental health, violence, etc.
A "tremendously big"
character
became
"enormous"
.
“Crazy stuff”
became
“weird stuff”
.
A chorus of indignation
“
This is nonsense censorship
,” writer Salman Rushdie wrote on Twitter.
"
If Dahl offends us, let's not reprint it
," said another successful children's author, Philip Pulmann, when interviewed by the BBC.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak believes the words should be
"preserved"
rather than
"retouched"
, his spokesman told reporters.
Read alsoIn the United States, literary censorship spearheads the ideological war
Roald Dahl (1916-1990) began to be translated into French in the 1960s. Gallimard published
James et la Grosse Pêche
in 1966, and
Charlie et la Chocolaterie
in 1967, and then reissued them regularly.
Less known to the general public than in the English-speaking world, it is nonetheless a very popular classic in France, with all its children's titles available in the Folio collection.
A rewritten Roald Dahl novel is no longer a Roald Dahl novel.
Bérengère Viennot, translator
"A rewritten Roald Dahl novel is no longer a Roald Dahl novel,"
said translator and columnist Bérengère Viennot on the online media Slate.
The cultural weekly
Télérama
pointed to the
"risk of erasing the benevolent irreverence"
of the author with caustic humor.
Sensitive cases
In France, the literary culture passes a very severe judgment on the alterations of works already published.
This was visible in the dropping of novel titles containing the word
"nigger"
, which caused some consternation.
Ten Little Negroes by Agatha Christie in 2020 and
Le Nègre du Narcisse
by Joseph Conrad in 2022 suffered an identical fate: these British book titles were removed in favor of others, chosen during the author's lifetime for the purpose of publication in the United States, where the term was banned for its racist connotation.
Today in bookshops there are
Christie's
They Were Ten , and Conrad's
Children of the Sea
.
Read also“Nègre”, “Schleu”, “poufiasse”… These words that Scrabble proscribes in the name of political correctness
No French publishing house uses the services of a
"sensitivity reader"
, a proofreader specifically responsible for detecting offensive terms or passages in books to be published.
Roald Dahl Story Company now belongs to a giant of culture, the American platform Netflix, known for its preference for so-called
"inclusive"
fiction .
Gallimard, meanwhile, is a publisher known for not being afraid of controversy.
Asked about calls for a boycott aimed at another Briton, the creator of
Harry Potter
JK Rowling, because of her positions on transsexual women, the director of Gallimard Jeunesse, Hedwige Pasquet, had declared in June 2020:
“As a house of n publishing, freedom of expression is our credo.
This is our absolute priority”
.