(Paris) 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 concerns Great Britain. We have never modified the texts of Roald Dahl, and to date it is not planned, ”said a spokesperson for Gallimard Jeunesse.
The British daily Daily Telegraph revealed on Friday that the rights holders had undertaken to smooth the language of all the children’s novels by this adored author of several generations. The Puffin editions (Penguin Random House group) will now publish a different text from the original.
“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,” he said. spokesperson for the company managing the work, the Roald Dahl Company.
The number of modified terms is vast, touching on issues considered sensitive: race and ethnicity, gender, weight, physical appearance, mental health, violence, etc. An “enormously big” character has become “enormous”. “A crazy thing” has become “a weird thing”.
This revelation shocked Britain.
“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 “touched up”, his spokesman told reporters.
Roald Dahl (1916-1990) began to be translated into French in the 1960s. Gallimard published James and the Giant Peach in 1966, and Charlie and the chocolate factory in 1967, to then reissue 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,” wrote translator and columnist Bérengère Viennot on the online media Slate.