Matilda, the five-year-old inveterate reader who stars in the famous Roald Dahl book, no longer reads Joseph Conrad but Jane Austen. She also doesn’t mind travel with her readings to India that she captivated Rudyard Kipling, but rather she prefers John Steinbeck’s California. These are just some of the changes that the Puffin publishing house has made to the famous book by the British writer.
It is not the only reading by the author that has undergone changes in its English version. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Augustus Gloop, the boy who loved sweets and fulfilled his dream of diving into a great pool of chocolate, is no longer a “fat” young man, but “huge”. In Las brujas he goes a step further and adds a phrase that never existed before. In a paragraph explaining that the leads are bald under their wigs, it now says, “There are many other reasons why women might wear wigs and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.”
Equally notable is the rhyme change of the song that the centipede sings in James and the Giant Peach. The original read: “Aunt Sponge was awfully fat / And awfully flabby”, and “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.” Both lines have now been removed and replaced. for “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by fruit”, and “Aunt Spiker was much the same / And deserves half the blame”.
These and a few other changes, such as the fact that Mrs Twit, from The Cretins, is no longer “ugly and bestial” but simply “bestial”, have been the result of an attempt to eliminate offensive language from some of her works, published in the United Kingdom by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House.
For this new review, we have had the help of ‘Inclusive Minds’, an association whose mission is to “break down barriers and challenge stereotypes to ensure that all children can access and enjoy great books that are representative of our diverse society”. as they stand out on their website.
From Alfaguara Infantil y Juvenil, a publisher that has the rights in Spanish to Roald Dahl’s books and publishes them throughout the Spanish-speaking territory, they specify to La Vanguardia that “no changes have been made to these editions. As news breaks out in the UK, our editors will ask if they propose changes and what kind of direction they suggest before making any further statements.”
The reactions have not been long in coming. Starting with Salman Rushdie himself, who assures on his Twitter account that “Roald Dahl was not an angel, but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.” But the truth is that the Roald Dahl Story Company, which controls the rights to the books, is the one who has worked hand in hand with Puffin to review the texts with the intention of making sure that “all children continue to enjoy the wonderful stories and Dahl’s characters”, according to the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that first highlighted these changes.
Lola Casas, author of children’s and youth literature and already retired teacher at the Camí del Mig school in Mataró, who personally knew Roald Dahl himself, has not been too funny about the matter either. In fact, she is considered one of the great experts on the British writer and she published the book Todo Dahl (La Galera) about it.
“I think right now he’s turning in his grave,” laments Casas to La Vanguardia. The teacher remembers by telephone the sometimes complicated character of the writer. “Knowing him, I wouldn’t have allowed him to change even a comma. A book is a book and it has to be understood in its context and in its time. His language also allows children of today to understand what reality was like in the past. Protecting them from language or concepts like racism is just blindfolding them, but that won’t stop those problems from disappearing, so I think it’s more interesting to explain it to them and for them to be part of the conversation.”
