![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
C**sorship 101
Feb. 20th, 2022 01:21 pmAs many of us are aware, February is Black History Month. I suspect somewhat fewer of us are aware that February 20-26 is Freedom to Read Week in Canada:
https://www.freedomtoread.ca/
So I'd like to devote this entry to some of the relevant reading I've been doing lately.
First up, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, by Randall Kennedy. Kennedy is a graduate of Harvard Law School, himself black, and he provides a far more thorough, well-documented and nuanced study of the use of the N-word, in various contexts, than anything I had read up to now. It was written in 2002, with an introduction and afterword added for the paperback edition in 2003. So before the Black Lives Matter movement or the killing of George Floyd but still, to me, a modern-day perspective. Unfortunately, Kennedy's study is limited to the U.S. context although of course much of it is applicable elsewhere.
Next up, I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which features the word "nigger" every few pages. It's hard to imagine how one could eliminate that word from the book, or substitute another word deemed less offensive, without eviscerating the whole story! But is the book racist? I'd say no. Jim, the escaping former slave, comes across as far more humane and fully fleshed-out than many of the other, more "sivilized" characters. And Twain's sardonic humour shines forth throughout.
Speaking of eviscerating a book, the edition I read, a cheap Bantam classic, fell apart while I was reading it and is now held together with an elastic. So while semantically and morphologically speaking it's an integrated, unexpurgated edition, in the purely physical sense it is anything but! That's mainly because it was assembled with "perfect binding", a technique falling far short of perfection in which paste is slapped along the edges of a stack of unsignatured pages and a flimsy cover folded around them with the spine aligned with the paste (if you're lucky). The pages were printed with decidedly niggardly margins so as I gently spread the book open a little farther so as to be able to read it properly, I inadvertently inflicted cracked spine syndrome on Samuel Clemens' masterpiece. If he were alive today, I somehow think he might have appreciated the irony of the situation.
All of which brings me to Century Press, an Ottawa-based venture dedicated to reprinting classic works of literature in the style to which they ought to be accustomed:
https://www.centurypress.ca/
In its first publication, The Great Gatsby, the man behind Century Press took it upon himself to substitute his own word for an offensive epithet in the original. In effect, he was putting words (or a word, anyway) in the mouth of one of Fitzgerald's characters. This naturally caused considerable outrage on the part of many loyal supporters of Century Press. As a result, he has promised not to do this in future, beginning with the second work in production, The Sun Also Rises.
Which brings me to another huge can of worms: how far is it reasonable to go (or not) in terms of translations, abridgements and adaptations?
While I can't do that question justice here, I will say that what prompts it is the PBS adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days, concluding this evening. It's very different from the Jules Verne original. Phileas Fogg does still go around the world in 80 days and does stop in roughly the same places as in the book. But the characters who accompany him and the things they do in each place and the reasons they do them are COMPLETELY different! Fixx has undergone both a career change and a gender reassignment and Passe-Partout is black in the PBS series. I will say that the acting and the cinematography are excellent and it's a likeable enough story. I just think it should have come with a bit more of a disclaimer. Will kids watching it in 2022 think that that's the way Jules Verne wrote it? Will they bother to find out? And does the adaptation really speak any better to what matters to people today? I recently ordered a Bande Dessinée of Around the World in 80 Days which looks to be closer to the original, in spite of being more obviously geared to a modern young audience. I'll let you know what I think once I've read it and looked at the pictures!
https://www.freedomtoread.ca/
So I'd like to devote this entry to some of the relevant reading I've been doing lately.
First up, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, by Randall Kennedy. Kennedy is a graduate of Harvard Law School, himself black, and he provides a far more thorough, well-documented and nuanced study of the use of the N-word, in various contexts, than anything I had read up to now. It was written in 2002, with an introduction and afterword added for the paperback edition in 2003. So before the Black Lives Matter movement or the killing of George Floyd but still, to me, a modern-day perspective. Unfortunately, Kennedy's study is limited to the U.S. context although of course much of it is applicable elsewhere.
Next up, I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which features the word "nigger" every few pages. It's hard to imagine how one could eliminate that word from the book, or substitute another word deemed less offensive, without eviscerating the whole story! But is the book racist? I'd say no. Jim, the escaping former slave, comes across as far more humane and fully fleshed-out than many of the other, more "sivilized" characters. And Twain's sardonic humour shines forth throughout.
Speaking of eviscerating a book, the edition I read, a cheap Bantam classic, fell apart while I was reading it and is now held together with an elastic. So while semantically and morphologically speaking it's an integrated, unexpurgated edition, in the purely physical sense it is anything but! That's mainly because it was assembled with "perfect binding", a technique falling far short of perfection in which paste is slapped along the edges of a stack of unsignatured pages and a flimsy cover folded around them with the spine aligned with the paste (if you're lucky). The pages were printed with decidedly niggardly margins so as I gently spread the book open a little farther so as to be able to read it properly, I inadvertently inflicted cracked spine syndrome on Samuel Clemens' masterpiece. If he were alive today, I somehow think he might have appreciated the irony of the situation.
All of which brings me to Century Press, an Ottawa-based venture dedicated to reprinting classic works of literature in the style to which they ought to be accustomed:
https://www.centurypress.ca/
In its first publication, The Great Gatsby, the man behind Century Press took it upon himself to substitute his own word for an offensive epithet in the original. In effect, he was putting words (or a word, anyway) in the mouth of one of Fitzgerald's characters. This naturally caused considerable outrage on the part of many loyal supporters of Century Press. As a result, he has promised not to do this in future, beginning with the second work in production, The Sun Also Rises.
Which brings me to another huge can of worms: how far is it reasonable to go (or not) in terms of translations, abridgements and adaptations?
While I can't do that question justice here, I will say that what prompts it is the PBS adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days, concluding this evening. It's very different from the Jules Verne original. Phileas Fogg does still go around the world in 80 days and does stop in roughly the same places as in the book. But the characters who accompany him and the things they do in each place and the reasons they do them are COMPLETELY different! Fixx has undergone both a career change and a gender reassignment and Passe-Partout is black in the PBS series. I will say that the acting and the cinematography are excellent and it's a likeable enough story. I just think it should have come with a bit more of a disclaimer. Will kids watching it in 2022 think that that's the way Jules Verne wrote it? Will they bother to find out? And does the adaptation really speak any better to what matters to people today? I recently ordered a Bande Dessinée of Around the World in 80 Days which looks to be closer to the original, in spite of being more obviously geared to a modern young audience. I'll let you know what I think once I've read it and looked at the pictures!
