21st-century editors should keep their hands off of 20th-century books

Actually, most of the refusal is because of copyrights.

Isn't that what happened with the more famous version of "The Princess Bride" (the one that ended up made into a movie)?

Our society has been doing this for a long time. My beloved Hardy Boy childhood books were actually the edited version - edited to remove racial stereotypes, says Wikipedia, and to target a different audience.

(Investigating now, the changes were extensive! Compare the 1927 "The Secret of the Old Mill " https://archive.org/details/the-secret-of-the-old-mill/page/... with the 1962 version at https://archive.org/details/secretofoldmil00fran/page/n15/mo... .)

The 1981 revised edition of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was edited (posthumously) to remove sexist stereotypes, like replace "insurance man" with "insurance agent", and drop the section on dealing with one's wife.

> Should we only consume media that we agree with?

There are many reasons to edit a book. The Hardy Boy books were edited to generate profit from an existing franchise.

The editors of the 1981 edition of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" argue that keeping the 'quaint and dated' references weaken 'the important message and overall impact' of the book. https://archive.org/details/howtowinfriendsi0000carn/page/14... .

Neither particularly fit your description of "everything has to be sunshine and rainbows".

Also, everyone wants to think that they would be the brave resistance fighter when in fact most of us don't "choose" sides in any meaningful sense and just go along with the status quo. I think seeing these really smart and progressive (for their time) people and what their blind spots were despite their brilliance can help me look inwards and see where I might be a "man of my time" and missing something later generations will judge me for

Humans need heroes, we need people to believe in, to aspire to - but we should never forget that our heroes are humans - and imperfect humans at that.

One of my biggest issues with the new puritanism, is we dont let people evolve either - once you've done one bad thing - no matter what redemption or evolution you have later in life - you're just the guy who did the bad thing.

Generally also, I think its bad to judge historical figures by current norms too.

Like on TR - TR's views on... well pretty much everything evolved over time too (he notably became more progressive and more radical in that progressivism with age).

His views on race evolved too as far as I know too (though I dont have sources handy to talk about it).

Perhaps "subclinical"?

I agree that it is important to have a full and complete historical record, but Netflix is interested in making money, and I recently read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my six year old and he loved it. So I started to read Charlie and the Glass Elevator to him and stopped only a few pages in when some very offensive caricatures of Chinese people talking in English showed up. And I haven't read my son any more Dahl since then, because I was genuinely shocked at what I had just read, stopped that book after that chapter, and went off to read something else instead, and haven't gotten around to James and the Giant Peach or Matilda again. It interrupted what could have been a lovely flow of Dahl books. So I can understand why the people who control the Dahl Company- and desperately want people like me to read his stories to people like my son- are stealth-editing them to kill the offensive stuff, so that I will buy more books, read them to my son, and then he will 30 years from now buy them and read them to his children because they have nostalgic value for him: they remind him of his dad reading to him.

This censorship isn't happening because of the iron hand of the state or anything like that. It's the result of people making choices within a capitalist system. It's because I have lots of great stories to choose from to read to my six year old, so why would I choose one that I have to explain lots of ugly bigotry? So Netflix is choosing to try and sand down those problems that might keep someone like me from reading the book to my kid, in a totally understandable way. And, as the rights owner trying to maximize revenue, that is their prerogative.

Far from guaranteed, with today's ever-lengthening copyright terms, and DMCA making it a felony to keep original versions around.

I am fat, and the sugar industry has nothing to do with it. I don't like sugar, or sweet food in general; I eat healthy, old-fashioned home-cooked meals prepared from zero-sugar raw ingredients - they just happen to be consistently bigger meals than a stressed out software engineer with a low physical activity level ought to be eating. So the weight increases.

There is a sane medium to be found somewhere between the "fat person = greedy and evil person" trope of 20th century fiction, and today's "fat person = innocent, agency-less victim of the Big Sugar conspiracy" trope.

Isn't that "impressive level of entitlement" a basic requirement for translation? It does take artistry to make a translation. Even if you're not going for a literary result, there are always going to be meanings that exist (or can be expressed efficiently) on one language but not the other. Then there are idioms and cultural references.

That is correct way of translating and not an violation. If the original author wrote the book with contemporary style, pleasant to read to people at the time, proper translation will produce contemporary text.

There is no reason to use archaisms or outdated language in translation if the original author was not using archaisms or outdated language.

But I wouldn't know how to translate that to Dutch; there simple aren't archaic words that mean the same, AFAIK, so you will have to convey that feeling in another way. Or what more often happens is that it will just get lost – and that's okay as a translation will never be the same as the original in any case.

(Aside: I also think that no one is "offended" by these sort of words, as they deliberately co-opted archaic words for their movements; everyone understands that older writings will use these words in their original meaning and no one has a problem with that. If you do, then you're a rather queer person IMO.)

You can think that a particular translation is poor, but there isn't a choice between a translation that does and does not add the artistry of the translator.

IIRC, that was done by the original author himself. That's far different than an anonymous committee quietly revising past works to conform to the current political line. I mean that's such a blatant parallel to a famous work of dystopian fiction that they should know better not to do it.

Though, I honestly look forward to a revised version of that famous work, revised to conform to modern sensitivities. IIRC, there's some out-of-fashion racial descriptions and the whole disapproving take on doctoring older works has to go.

Let's consider a cultural work. If I make a poem, it's covered under copyright. Suppose the local library posts it on the wall for a season, for anyone to come by and read.

Libraries like to promote local culture, so they rotate things out so others get a chance to show their work. At the end of the season, my work comes down.

I take it home and file it for later. Perhaps I'm looking for a publisher but it takes a few years to find one.

It's now much harder to find in its original form.

That withdrawal from the public sphere does not revoke my copyright, nor should it revoke my copyright.

Instead of worrying about the country being founded by bourgeoisie supremacists whose writing the country still uses as its foundation…let’s worry if Mount Rushmore or Jefferson get “cancelled”. If they aren’t cancelled, what of all the dead victims of the exclusionary foundation of the country?

We all know that controlling language is a form of power and that's the entire point of these revisions. Whoever controls the language controls the masses, it has been said. Destroy whatever was important and sacred to the culture you're colonizing and/or destroying. The first step is to change the meaning of words. And of course, it's "for the children".

Then just don't make changes, and trust that your readers are capable of withstanding raw, unfiltered, uncensored exposure to words from a different time and place. You don't need to "protect" people from wrong opinions, and they don't want to be protected

If a work is written by a racist author, changing a few words isn't magically going to make the author not racist. Their opinions will have influenced the entire story. The article clearly demonstrates this with the Death on the Nile example: the entire work is based on the framework of British colonialism, removing a few racist stereotypes isn't going to change anything about that! At best, you end up pretending that racism never existed - which isn't exactly a great thing to teach children either.

Works like that should be provided as-is, with the required context as to why the work is the way it is. If we want to provide children with works that are more up-to-date with today's society, then start providing newer works. It's not as if nobody has written a book in the last few decades!

And I agree with your point, and that it extends well beyond the 20th century back to the day of patrons and benefactors who would support a creative endeavor.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler

It's a political pamphlet, not a novel.

Peter Singer?

And you know what? His Cinderella was fucking terrible and I’ve been waiting decades to have a platform to point that out. His original IPs are way better than his retellings. Glad to get that off my chest.

I've seen a theory as to where this is coming from. The particular university, as do many universities, have an inflated administration where some even have more staff than students. A significant part of that staff is DEI and pretty much everybody is to commit to this agenda.

So, you have a huge amount of people that continuously need to show evidence that they're committed to the cause. What would be the easiest thing to do?

You type in a bunch of bullshit in Word, because that's far easier than working in a soup kitchen. Actually improving the world is hard so instead you do this easy thing that provides the optics, and nothing more. You don't even need to believe it, it's largely driven by fear.

It's like an engine that can't be stopped.

It's absurd, it's tacky, and it won't age well.

I'm inclined to think they do, actually.

Often the revisions soften the weirdness or offensiveness of outdated mores, beliefs and customs, but by blurring them out, you miss a teaching opportunity: explaining how things were, how things are now, and why they changed.

It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.

These edits (as shown in the article) seem to do more to make good books bad - if the edits enhance sensitivity or not, is an aside.

But perhaps your childhood was different.

When works go out of print they become rare and hard to find. There are only 200 or so original prints of the First Folio in existence; Shakespeare is kept alive by subsequent reprintings. When publishers "update" old works for modern sensibilities, it's with an eye toward replacing the old version with the new; they simply refuse to publish the old version. If it's a print book it'll still be there, but become slowly harder and harder to obtain until it's nearly impossible, and most people don't even remember it anyway[0]. If it's an e-book, it's as good as gone; anyone who still has it has committed a felony to preserve it. Long copyright terms help enormously with this.

Some books don't even get replaced. The word "nerd" is thought to have originated from the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo; Seuss's publisher has decided the book is too racist to continue to be in print, so it too has gone on to book afterlife.

[0] The black pygmy Oompa-Loompas were almost a "Mandela effect" thing for me; my school library had a 1960s edition of the book. Only when I read about the changes later in life was I like "Oh, so that's why the Oompa-Loompas are different."

It would be like someone deciding that only the NIV of the bible can be bought from now on, and the KJV wouldn't be sold any more and all e-book versions of the KJV would be updated. For modern readers the NIV is clearly the better translation IMO, but there's obviously also a lot of value in having the KJV around (as well as other editions).

I also have some gripes with some specific edits they made – at times it feels like they weren't even trying to replace the original with something decent and some edits are ridiculous – but that's more minor. The biggest problem was the "here are the new versions and these are the versions everyone should have and the original versions never existed" kind of attitude they seemed to have.

There are many people who agree with me. It's "sacred" to the Post because the people writing for the Post believe these works have a place in the literary canon. People in society possess systems of morals that directly contradict each other.

It's a case of changing the meaning of the statement vs translating the vocabulary to more accurately reflect the original meaning. Editing Lord of the Rings so Frodo tosses another bundle of sticks onto the fire doesn't alter the meaning. His example from Death on the Nile is straight-up altering the personality of a character to make her a better person.

Spoiled children of privilege work at publishers because no one else can afford degrees from the right colleges, then move on to working for free in New York, or being handed the job by a friend of a friend. They have no concept of art that doesn't involve seeing themselves "reflected" in it, and they think "inclusion" is them allowing other types of people to see themselves in art (and they think that they should be praised for this "tolerance" and "celebration" of "identities.")

Real inclusion is having a system that includes people working in it that aren't all from the same flaky class, and with the new addition of queer identities, all of your diversity can consist of wealthy straight white people (there's barely any reason to pretend to be Native American, Hispanic, or black anymore.) Their awful scribbles on the works of their superiors (the significantly less narcissistic privileged white people of the past) age like fish, and their work will be seen by relatively normal people from the future as bowdlerized works are seen now: as birdcage liner.