Carmen Naranjo |
Madrid (EFE) fact that in some cases it is reversed.
This is what has happened with the British publisher Puffin UK, which finally announced that it would launch the original collection of Roald Dahl’s Classics at the end of the year “to keep the author’s classic texts in print” after criticism of the edited version of the writer’s novels with Modifications to remove potentially offensive language.
For the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the decision to republish the super-detective James Bond novels without racial references that could be considered offensive, is “more hypocritical Anglo-Saxon garbage that we Europeans will make our own, as usual”, as he indicated in a tweeted the author, for whom the 21st century “is being the century of stupidity”.
“Thanks to the demagogues, the opportunists who make this their business and the idiots who applaud them,” says the writer about this decision by the company that owns the rights to the books on James Bond, Ian Fleming Publications, which commissioned a review of the texts to a commission of readers and has decided to bring out the novels again without those potentially offensive racial allusions.
Among the changes, it is expected that the word “black” (sic) with which slaves of that race were designated in English will disappear, although other racial descriptions will also be suppressed, while others will remain unchanged.
Likewise, a warning will be introduced to accompany the adventures of 007 that will remind that “this book was written at a time when terms and attitudes that could be considered offensive by modern readers were common.”
Roald Dahl’s works will not change in Spanish
The revisions to Dahl’s texts, which will not be produced in their Spanish editions, both in Spain and in Latin America, have been criticized from the outset by writers, editors and politicians, including the British Prime Minister himself, Rishi Sunak: “It is important that works of literature and works of fiction be preserved and not edited.” “We have always defended the right to free speech and expression,” he observed.
The Spanish Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, also stated that he was “against the use of filters, the supposed correction fees or the cancellation” of books, while the president of the Federation of Publishers Guilds of Spain, Daniel Fernández He warned that this modification of works “in the Spanish legislative framework is illegal.”
It is, in the opinion of the president of the Spanish publishers, “a way of closing one’s eyes to what one does not want to see.” “And if now we are going to hide that slavery existed because it offends us, it is nonsense.”
From the writer Julia Navarro, who believes that with these positions today’s society is getting closer and closer to the dystopia of George Orwell’s “1984”, to the filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo, who believes that behind these issues “there is always a hidden need from a few to make up the past to cover a little more in the present”, the creators have raised a cry in the sky before these practices.
disney affected
Warnings about the time in which a work was created are not new: in 2020, Disney decided to include content warnings at the beginning of classic films such as “Dumbo” (1941), “Peter Pan” (1953) or “The Book of the jungle” (1967) that advances the racist connotations that his old films may contain.
“This program includes negative representations and/or mistreatment of people or cultures,” indicates the label, which is projected 10 seconds before the start of the movies on its Disney+ streaming platform, in which it explains the reasons why that has not altered the content: “These stereotypes were wrong then and they are now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it, and spark conversations to create a more inclusive future together.”
The formula chosen by Disney on its streaming platform – opting not to edit the films and warn about their content – was imitated by other platforms such as HBO Max, which added an explanation of the “historical context” to “Gone with the Wind ( “Gone With The Wind” (1939) after temporarily removing it from its platform.
The entry The reviews of books like those of Roald Dahl, open the controversy about what is politically correct was first published in EFE Noticias.
