Mohammed removed from new Dutch translation of Dante's Inferno (French) | Hacker News Reader

Mohammed removed from new Dutch translation of Dante's Inferno (French)

lefigaro.fr

57 pointsRed_Tarsius19 comments

Southpark said it best when it comes to censorship of mohammed and criticism of islam:

KYLE: That’s because there is no goo, Mr. Cruise. You see, I learned something today. Throughout this whole ordeal, we’ve all wanted to show things that we weren’t allowed to show, but it wasn’t because of some magic goo. It was because of the magical power of threatening people with violence. That’s obviously the only true power. If there’s anything we’ve all learned, it’s that terrorizing people works.

JESUS: That’s right. Don’t you see, gingers, if you don’t want to be made fun of anymore, all you need are guns and bombs to get people to stop.

SANTA: That’s right, friends. All you need to do is instill fear and be willing to hurt people and you can get whatever you want. The only true power is violence.

Note that this ending was banned, and you'll have to do some search before you find it.

When HBO Max started streaming South Park they just skipped these problematic episodes now called "200" and "201" respectively, and I also believe the "Super Best Friends" episode where Mohammed is pictured (but portrayed as a powerful just power).

It's a great argument in favor of piracy.

vid version https://youtu.be/mDmOGN-x0ls

As long as they also remove the Greek philosophers, that would be fine for me. Otherwise, it is discrimination against atheists.

To stretch that line of reasoning, are all religious text and places of workship discriminating against athiests too?

Yes? But most of the times an atheist has used this argument it has been an ad absurdum exercise, exactly meant to show how silly the original premise is.

Religion poisons everything and I miss Christopher.

As a Christian, I miss Christopher too - he argued in good faith if a bit stridently and in a bit of a twist demonstrated the Christian value of the individual person being just as important as the King.

I don't speak French, probably like the majority of HN crowd. Leaving aside the bizarre fact that this got promoted to the front page, can anyone TLDR this for me?

Its the dilemma between keeping historical literature intact despite its controversial and possibly inciteful passage vs translating/adapting it to be more politically correct for the present day audience. In this Dutch translation, they chose the latter.

"when Dante enters Hell, he visits the nine concentric circles. He then meets the many people - some of whom are historical figures - who are punished there for their sins. Arrived at the eighth circle, the poet meets the prophet Muhammad, punished " because by spreading his religion he would have sowed discord on Earth " reports the Belgian daily De Standaard. This passage has thus been partially amputated in the new translation." "The goal of the publisher was to make L'Enfer accessible to a public. wider possible, and especially the young audience, and we knew that if we left this passage as it is we would have unnecessarily hurt a large part of the readers. The passage has been preserved, but the name of Mahomet has been deleted".

That doesn't seem like a dilemma at all. Historical literature has contents some people find offensive. It's a poem written by a Medieval Catholic; of course he had negative opinions about Islam. Why pretend otherwise? Any mature and reasonable person should be able to understand that context.

> Any mature and reasonable person should be able to understand that context.

Amen, it seems like we can't take this for granted anymore.

It’s ironic given the Quran is littered with antisemitism.

In Dante's inferno, he encounters Mohammed in hell, implying that he was responsible for the violence of Islam. This is seen a provocative to muslim readers so they edited it out.

He is clearly in hell for being a heretic in Dante's eyes, not because he was "responsible for the violence of Islam".

"sown discord on the earth" is a bit stronger than simply calling someone an heretic.

Even if I accepted that, and I don't considering you're talking about a medieval Catholic, they would have been part-and-parcel for Dante if my understanding of his views on politics and religion are reasonably calibrated.

Heretics belonged in the 6th Circle, and Mohammed was in the 8th, so clearly Dante thought he had done something more than just heresy.

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