In 1937, a story relatively similar to the one that involved the writer Roald Dahl in an episode of intervention and censorship of his texts in new editions that will be carried by Puffin books, a label that is part of Penguin, happened in 2023. publishing group. In this case, Netflix also mediated, which acquired Dahl’s works. Film versions or series would not be projected with that casual language of the author Matilda or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The episode didn’t seem like anything new to me. He said that in 1937, something similar happened from another perspective: Walt Disney made the first feature-length animated film based on the story of Snow white and seven dwarfs. Harvard specialist in ancient literature and folklore, Professor María Tatar, declared that “folklorists hate Disney”, and she did so in a detailed documentary on… Netflix. The documentary is called “Fairy Tales” and was released in 2021. Tatar’s explanation in the documentary is that Disney created a standard, sugar-coated version of the story that has as many complex and dark readings as its original German version compiled by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century, too. hiding different local variants of the story. Disney’s purpose was fulfilled: the story became a children’s version. But the story does not end there, as the documentary shows. The Brothers Grimm, when they published their book stories from childhood and home In 1812, they included the story of Rapunzel, a long-haired girl imprisoned in a tower by the witch Gothel. In the original version, the prince climbs thanks to Rapunzel’s hair and becomes pregnant with twins, which is why the witch banishes them. Criticism was fierce and the Brothers Grimm decided to soften the story so that there would be no more embarrassment in the following editions. So far the Netflix documentary, the owner of the rights to Dahl’s works.

It would be absurd to demonize this platform of (very good) series and (increasingly bad) movies. I would like to point out something else. The problem does not come from Walt Disney at all, who would take the prize for political correctness, where there are already stories set in Latin American themes such as Chicken (Mexico), Emperor’s follies (Peru), Charm (Colombia) or River (Brazil), or in which there is a juicy sisterhood as occurs in Frozen. The matter goes back centuries before the Brothers Grimm. It is the very history of literature. Manuscripts or texts are always subject to a flurry of censorship, amputations, destruction, disappearance, and even very small omissions by medieval scribes or hasty editors. It is an integral part of writing. It is precisely here that the demands and satisfactions of literary criticism, philology and ecdotics arise, and the disciplines tasked with restoring the text to its original state in the editorial office. Sometimes decades or centuries pass, and these researchers are at once horrified but also exhilarated by the revealing omissions of what was a manipulated text. Centuries of scholars of the Greek and Latin classics continue to uncover incredible inaccuracies and errors, and will continue to do so. And even more subtle: the meticulous strategies of writers who, in periods of great censorship, had to publish in such a way that their texts masked complex messages with an innocuous appearance or false statements that appeased the censors. This history of censorship, whether it comes from the banned books of the Catholic Church’s Index librorum prohibitorum, from Muslim theologians or from totalitarian governments, has long been written.

So the problem, in reality, is not on the side of lamenting these editorial or textual manipulations, even where (bad) translators guess. Despite these distortions, prose texts, be they short stories or novels, tend to resist this transmission rather than good, which is not the case with poetry. To modify a word in a poem by Góngora, Celano, César Vallejo or Elizabeth Bishop is to change it and destroy its accuracy, rhythm and meaning. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen in a novel or a short story, but that it happens in a different way. And this is affected by the problem of censorship, political correctness, dismissal or the euphemism of “sensitive readers” who are the ones who mediate in assessing whether a text can hurt sensibilities. That role should belong to a brilliant and talented editor, which is an indication of the crisis of publishers if they reach out to “sensitive readers”. I say it affects because the deep conflict of frontal or insidious censorship lies not in the visibly manipulated texts, but in the invisibly unborn. I mean the provision which cancels in writers and writers the birth of a writing which would require certain words to express the whole nature of its history. In other words, self-censorship is a serious problem. It could be argued that today’s social networks, especially Twitter, have dishonored many people under the pretense of being angels on duty to redeem the oppressed, sometimes using as much violence as their victims have suffered. But it’s different when you go to more complex and sustainable formats. In any case, it is in the writer’s mind, in the verbal impulse of his prose, or in that zone of mystery that I do not want to call inspiration, where a state of veto from fear, not necessarily real, delicately breaks the thread of the narrative, that invisible music called syntax. No one said that literature would be a comfortable bed or a story for children. And this does not mean that the best text is rude, rude or violent. It’s the opposite. Rather, he is the one who flows without looking for what to say. As Roald Dahl wrote, by the way. (OR)