(Paris) The French translations of Agatha Christie will be the subject of “revisions”, in particular the deletion of terms deemed offensive on the physique or the origin of characters, “thus aligning themselves with other international editions”, a said a spokeswoman for Éditions du Masque to AFP on Monday.
“The French translations of Agatha Christie’s work are subject to the usual revisions and over the years have incorporated the corrections requested by Agatha Christie Limited (the company that manages the author’s work, editor’s note), thus aligning with the other international editions”, specifies the publisher, which is part of the Hachette group.
At the end of March, the British daily The Telegraph had reported that several passages from the novels recounting the investigations of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, originally published between 1920 and 1976, had been rewritten after peer review.
In particular, the publisher has modified or removed descriptions of certain foreign characters.
As in Death on the Nile (1937), where the character of Mrs Allerton complained about a group of children and laughed at their noses, or in The mysterious case of Styles (1920), in which Hercule Poirot pointed out that another character was “a Jew, of course”.
This is not the first time that a work by Agatha Christie has been modified. In 2020, the detective novel ten little niggers », one of the most read and sold in the world, had been renamed They were ten and the pejorative appellation, cited 74 times in the original version, had been removed from the new edition.
Recently, changes to English author Roald Dahl’s children’s novels sparked outrage in the UK.
References to weight, mental health, violence or racial issues had been redacted from works like Charlie and the chocolate factory Or James and the Big Peach.
Faced with the outcry, its publisher, Puffin UK, had assured that it would continue to publish the original versions in a special collection.
The author’s French publishing house, Gallimard Jeunesse, had indicated that it would continue to publish the original versions.
The adventures of the famous British spy James Bond, written by Ian Fleming, have also been rewritten in English to remove certain passages deemed racist.