Welcome to the weekend!
Apologies for not writing to you yesterday; I was torn about sharing another piece by Dahl after already sharing his marital murder mystery, “Lamb to the Slaughter,” last weekend. This past week, we learned that Dahl, an author with a penchant for the macabre and bizarre, has suffered the worst treatment an artist can endure — vituperators are traipsing all over his lines with bowdlerizing red pens.
So, while I dislike authorial repetition, in solidarity with a dead man who cannot shift himself to defend his works from captious fussbudgets, here’s an excerpt from The BFG: a tale of a little girl who’s kidnapped by a most peculiar and, thankfully, exclusively snozzcumber-munching, giant.
Dahl writes:
The Giant picked up the trembling Sophie with one hand and carried her across the cave and puter on the table.
Now he really is going to eat me, Sophie thought.
The Giant sat down and stared hard at Sophie. He had truly enormous ears. Each one was as big as the wheel of a truck and he seemed able to move them inwards and outwards from his head as he wished.
“I is hungry!” the Giant boomed. He grinned, showing massive square teeth. The teether were very white and very square and they sat in his mouth like huge slices of white bread.
“P . . . please don’t eat me,” Sophie stammered.
The Giant let out a bellow of laughter. “Just because I is a giant, you think I is a man-gobbling cannybull!” he shouted. “You is about right! Giants is everywhere around! Out there us has the famous Bonecruching Giant! Bonecrunching Giant crunches up two wopsey whiffling human beans for supper every night! Noise is earbursting! Noise of crunching bones goes crackety-crack for miles around!”
“Owch!” Sophie said.
“Bonecrunching Giant only gobbles human beans from Turkey,” the Giant said. “Every night Bonecruncher is galloping off to Turkey to gobble Turks.”
Sophie’s sense of patriotism was suddenly so bruised by this remark that she became quite angy. “Why Turks?” she blurted out. “What’s wrong with the English?”
Bonecrunching Giant says Turks is tasting oh ever so much juicer and more scrumdiddlyumptious! Bonecruncher says Turkish human beans has a glamourly flavour. He says Turks from Turkey is tasting of turkey.”
“I suppose they would,” Sophie said.
“Of course they would!” the Giant shouted. “Every human bean is diddly and different. Some is scrumdiddlyumptious and some is uckyslush. Greeks is all full of uckyslush. No giant is eating Greeks, ever.”
“Why not?” Sophie asked.
“Greeks from Greece is all tasting greasy,” the Giant said.
“I imagine that’s possible too,” Sophie said.
Roald Dahl’s works have ostensibly been edited because they’re sort of mean and nasty. Above, we read that the BFG thinks that humans from various parts of the world taste different. Are Greeks greasier than the global average? Probably not, though their liberal use of hair products may have something to do with the review. Do Turks taste like turkey? I leave that to another Wisconsinite to attest to. But both of these are examples of childhood logic, cunningly disguised (like three kids stacked in a trench coat) in the form of a vegetarian giant.
Critics of reaction to the expurgation of Dahl’s writings say things like, “Well, language is always changing. These are updates for today’s children, with more of our values included.” Bollocks. I have beside me Simon Armitage’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Opening the book, Armitage’s translation faces the original language. In other words, the reader is informed that Armitage altered the story for easier consumption, and further, that the original — or, at least, as close as we can get to the original — tale resides alongside. The rewrite of Dahl is not being sold as “updated for the modern reader,” it’s being sold as the original works of Dahl. As I wrote of modern academia’s treatment of Melville in another piece:
I picture academics jumping on Melville’s back as he hunches over the writing desk, wresting manuscripts from his hands, derisively spitting on him before flitting off to some American literature conference to say that whales represent late-stage capitalism.
To rewrite Dahl without explicitly noting the changes is to time travel, beat the author over the head, and scribble in some cheerless dreck while he’s unconscious on the floor. It’s an immoral act to treat an artist’s works this way. Stop it.
If hall monitors want a politcally correct version of Dahl, make a translation — don’t mess with source material. While you all are engaged with that censorious nonsense, the rest of us will be joyfully reading about ugly women, fat men selling cars with sawdust in the engine bays, and the Bonecrunching Giant’s affection for turkey-tasting Turks.