While the controversies unleashed by the redaction of Roald Dahl’s books have not yet subsided, political correctness focuses on the books by Ian Fleming and his well-known agent.
The criticism unleashed by the intervention in Dahal’s production was so great that the English publisher was forced to add to the modified or, to put it bluntly, censored, editions, the classic editions so that they could continue circulating as the author intended. of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
We will have to wait and see if Fleming’s books suffer the same fate. At the moment, it is not.
As reported by the Efe agency, the publisher Ian Fleming Publications Ltd decided to reissue the works that have agent 007 as the protagonist to commemorate the appearance of the first novel in the saga, Casino Royale and it will do so with the language that it considers appropriate for today’s times. It will also include a warning: “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes that could be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.”
The publishing house stated “We reviewed the text of the original Bond books and decided that the best we could do was follow the author’s lead. We have entered into Live and Let Diethe changes that he himself authorized. Following his approach, we have examined the instances of various racial terms in the books and have either removed several words or substituted terms more accepted today, but in keeping with the time the books were written.”
From now on the agent of the British Secret Service created by Fleming and inspired by his own life, since he was also an intelligence services officer, and also in the life of the Serbian secret agent Dusko Popov, He will have, as always, his weapon ready, but his adventures will be told in a language that is as smooth and smooth as a baby’s skin.
Certain racial references will be removed. For example, the derogatory word “nigger” used by Fleming in the 1950s and 1960s will be dropped. However, references to other ethnicities will remain.
Beyond the specific modifications to the original texts, the first question that arises when faced with the modifications, whatever they may be, is to what extent someone has the right to do so. “Good intentions” are sometimes too similar to censorship and suppose, like it, an underestimation of the reader. Who can determine what each person can read or not?
Recently, in an interview with Carlos Gamerro that appeared in this newspaper, the writer referred to his book Seven essays on the plague whose sources were fictional stories, whether literary, cinematographic or pictorial from different moments in history, to find out what other pandemics had been like. If someone wanted to reconstruct the time when Fleming wrote a few years later, they might end up concluding that the world suddenly turned good and sweet like a caramelized apple that you buy in the market. Of course, some men had a license to kill, but they did it with such beautiful words that the truth, even the murders were pleasing.
In 1979, during the military dictatorship, María Elena Walsh had the courage to write an article published in the newspaper Clarion which was called “Misadventures in Kindergarten-Country.” Among other things, he said: “For a long time we have been like children and we cannot say what we think or imagine. When the censor disappears because he will ever be demolished by a freeway! we will be decrepit and no longer knowing what to say. We will have forgotten the how, the where and the when and we will sit in a square like the couple of old men in Quino’s drawing who wondered: `We what, were we?`
The quoted paragraph is relevant because political correctness has become global. Many of the people who tore their clothes for the censorship imposed by the military civic dictatorship of Argentina, today accept it, if they consider that it is for a good cause and decree what is legal or illegal to say. We live in the era of the euphemism that is usually one of the masks that prejudice adopts. Today, even the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy is subversive.
