References to weight, gender or race are removed from the original lyrics of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” or “Matilda”. These changes do not affect the French versions of these children’s classics.
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl portrayed characters “Lowercase letters” etc “no higher than my knee”, they are now only “the small”. He presented them as “little men”you will be “small people”. And Augustus Gloop will be gone “big” in the description of the author of books that have become classics of children’s literature, who died in 1990 at the age of 74. So many modifications of the original texts decided by the British publisher Puffin (Penguin Random House Group) who made this choice to create these stories “joy all children even today”.
Therefore, leave anything that could generate discrimination based on gender, weight, mental health or even race. In the original version of Mathilde, the heroine was reading Rudyard Kipling, a man, she is now turning the pages of Jane Austen, a woman. A witch who wanted to go incognito was “supermarket checkout” or typed “Letters for a Businessman”there she is “Top Scientists or Business Leaders” in 2023. The “cloud people” from James and the Giant Peach will the “cloud people”.
This new version of Roald Dahl’s novels has been unveiled by the British daily The Telegraph. The book review was launched at the initiative of its titular successors in 2020, before Netflix took over the children’s writer’s catalog in 2021. The French editions are currently not affected, assures the French publisher Roald Dahl, Gallimard. “We never changed Roald Dahl’s lyrics and to this day there are no plans to do so”written down Gallimard youth. A spokesman for the company administering the work, the Roald Dahl Company, vindicates himself, arguing that “when reprinting books written years ago, it is not uncommon to review the language used and other elements such as the cover and to update the layout”.
“Absurd censorship,” claims Salman Rushdie
These changes to Roald Dahl’s original lyrics provoked strong reactions across the English Channel. “Roald Dahl was no angel, that’s absurd censorship” British writer Salman Rushdie, icon of freedom of expression, was outraged on Twitter, the victim of a violent attack six months ago. For Suzanne Nossel, patron of PEN America, an organization of 7,000 writers for freedom of expression, “Selective editing to adapt the words of the literature to specific sensitivities could represent a dangerous new weapon”. The Just is also outraged. “The editor should be ashamed of this botched operation” reigns daily.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak himself opposed these changes, believing that the words should be so “preserved” instead of “retouched”his spokesman said on Monday. “If Dalh offends us, let’s not reprint it”for his part launched the writer Philip Pullman, Monday on the BBC.
