It is a revision that makes people cringe across the Channel. New editions of British children’s author Roald Dahl’s books will be edited, with the aim of removing vocabulary that might be considered offensive.

References to weight, mental health, violence, or racial or gender issues have been redacted and rewritten: these are the sensitive themes that would have been targeted, according to the conservative Daily Telegraph.

Thus, the term “fat” is no longer used to describe Augustis Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. James’ “cloud men” and the giant peach become the “cloud people”. “Small and carefully considered” changes, assures a spokesperson for the Roald Dahl Story Company.

“Absurd Censorship”

“Roald Dahl was no angel,” tweeted British writer Salman Rushdie, a free speech icon who was violently attacked six months ago, “this is absurd censorship.” . PEN America boss Suzanne Nossel, an organization of 7,000 free-speech writers, said “selective editing to make the words of literature conform to particular sensibilities could be a dangerous new weapon.” . The deputy editor of the conservative Sunday Times newspaper, Laura Hackett, said she would keep her original editions of Roald Dahl, so her children could “enjoy them in all their wicked and colorful glory”.

For British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the words should be “preserved” rather than “retouched”, his spokesman said Monday during a regular press briefing. “If Dahl offends us, let’s not reprint him,” writer Philip Pullman told the BBC on Monday, noting that millions of his original books would remain in circulation for many years regardless of any changes made to them. new editions.

Retain the story, characters and spirit of the original text

“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,” the doorman said. -word of the Roald Dahl Company, emphasizing the desire to retain story, characters, and “the irreverence and sharp wit of the original text”. The Roald Dahl Story Company also said it worked with Inclusive Minds, a collective that campaigns for the inclusion and accessibility of children’s literature. The review was launched in 2020 before the acquisition in 2021 by Netflix of the catalog of the author for children.

Roald Dahl, a go-to author in many children’s libraries, died in 1990 at the age of 74. At the end of 2020, his family had apologized for the anti-Semitic remarks made by the author forty years ago. The creator of Matilda or the Good Big Giant had notably made openly anti-Semitic statements in an interview with the British magazine New Statesman in 1983, legitimizing anti-Semitism and seeming to find justifications for Hitler’s crimes.