I often talk about how I was influenced by Heinlein. What I don’t mention is that the only books of his that could even vaguely be considered juveniles which I could find translated into Portuguese in the early seventies (which doesn’t mean that the others weren’t translated, only that I could no longer find them. Portuguese book business has always worked on no-back-list, so barring finding the book used you were simply out of luck) were The Door Into Summer and Have Spacesuit Will Travel. (This last one, of course, hit straight home because in many ways my family resembled Kip’s. In many ways, too, I WAS Peewee.)
I read the juveniles after I got married. My husband had about half of them, and I tracked the others down, used, one at a time, till my mid thirties. (The days before Amazon were dark, oh, children of mine.)
But the thing is that before Heinlein I had another very strong influence on my formation and character. Those of you who are from Europe, nod as you go along – Enid Blyton.
Yes, I know what is said of Ms. Blyton. I don’t know if they call her sexist, but I’ve heard her accused of being racist and/or hating gypsies. (Did she? Well, I didn’t see it that way. In Circus of adventure the gypsy girl is a central and sympathetic character. BUT even if she had a condescending attitude to gypsies, it’s not race prejudice as such. Part of it has a reason, at least if you go back far enough in Britain. When sheep-culture [I can’t remember the Latin term. Oviculture?] began in England, the enclosing and merging of lands led to a lot of marginal tenant families being dispossessed of the land they had farmed for generations. Any number of them became “counterfeit gypsies.” It was a way of avoiding the work house. They dressed colorfully, moved from place to place, engaged in minor acts of pilfering. “Gipsy” became the British word for “Homeless” or “Transient.” The encampment of gypsies in Jane Austen’s Emma was almost certainly of this nature. In that sense, it had nothing to do with race, and it was more akin to a young woman being afraid to cross a homeless camp – for that matter, probably not entirely unfounded. Just because someone is discriminated against, it doesn’t make them angels. My guess is that is the background of Blyton’s recoil from gypsies, if any.)
She’s also been accused of class prejudice. Look, I wouldn’t know. I did not grow up in a classless society, so at the ages I read her – four to ten or so – I would have been blind to it, at any rate. It was just part of instruction on “How to behave properly.”
And right there, I must point out these things might be far more evident in the early childhood books. I’ve heard of Noddy. A friend of mine had one book. But I never actually read any of those books. The ones that helped form me were Famous Five and the Adventure books. (I discovered the boarding school ones much later and read them, but by that time I was beyond “forming” at that level.)
What do I mean formed me?
Well, Enid Blyton who might or might not have hated Heinlein on sight, shared with him one important characteristic. It is something that goes well beyond being a good writer, something almost of an alchemic nature, which is difficult to pin down.
They create in you a sense of morals – their morals – and a desire to follow them so that the author’s characters [or more often, bluntly, the author] would approve of you.
Admired, loved, important writers completely lack this. (I could be wrong on this, being, again, well past the age of being formed, but from what I saw of how these influenced my younger son, J. K. Rowling completely lacks this, but Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series has it in spades.)
From Ms. Blyton I got un-Portuguese and frankly un-feminine senses of fair play and nobless oblige. (Now, not totally un-Portuguese because the Northern region I come from was heavily influenced by England. However, certain things that Blyton managed to instill with me, such as not taking advantage of personal connections and trying to get ahead purely on merit, or keeping a stiff upper lip and not displaying emotions, are outright counterproductive in Portuguese society.)
I’m not going to speculate on what creates that effect. That’s a subject for another column. I suspect it’s some combination of a strong personality, a strong voice, attractive stories AND the courage to give your opinion loud and clear. (Agatha Christie seems to have this effect on some people, but not most, possibly due to her rather more quiet personality.)
I can tell you Enid Blyton had that effect, though, because hers were the first books I evangelized, and I saw her attitudes push into everyone to whom I gave the books.
Yes, I know what I said above about the attitudes being counterproductive in Portugal – but all the same they gave me a way to arrange my inner universe. And they dovetailed rather well with the attitudes I picked up from Heinlein, btw. So, of course, when I had children, I wanted to influence them to be more like me, so I could understand them (And verse the vice of course ;) )
Heinlein books were easy to come by, and by then I had hold of the juveniles. Enid Blyton, on the other hand… The year before we had Robert, with the vague idea that a miracle might happen and we might eventually reproduce (well, we’d been trying for five years, in our twenties) I stopped by a bookstore in England to look for the books. And recoiled.
There were books with those titles, right enough. But they were not the books I’d read. There were televisions, and computer games. But what was more, the kids did not sound RIGHT. It was a short excursion and I didn’t have the time to really read them, but I walked away shaking my head. The books had been re-written, which I thought I understood. But I had no intention of exposing my kids to this. I didn’t know if whatever they’d done left the alchemy intact.
Fortuitously, years later, when Robert turned three, a friend of mine – hi Charles! – worked at a used bookstore. When someone came in wishing to trade a large box of Enid Blyton, the books didn’t even go on the shelf. I got a phone call, and rushed down.
These were the real deal, the books from my childhood. I passed them on to the child, and again, the alchemy worked.
Now, you’re saying “But Sarah, they had to modernize the books. How could kids read them otherwise? Children are not sophisticated. They have to read about kids like them, in environments like theirs.”
Really? REALLY? You’re REALLY REALLY REALLY going to tell me that? And you expect me to believe it? (Presses fingers on either side of the bridge of her nose, closes eyes and shakes her head.) What kind of children do you people have? More importantly, what kind of namby pamby expectations do you have of your children?
Throughout history children were raised on stories of lands long before their own and far more alien to them than England between the wars would be for children today. Even fairytales should be incomprehensible to American children a hundred years ago. Were they? No. Children will accept the parameters of a story, and then build from that. Doing that is no different than learning the rules of Harry Potter and enjoying the books. I mean, kids, you do know that your children aren’t learning broom flight and magic, right?
Is the setting of Enid Blyton’s adventure tales odd to modern children? I should hope so. It was outright alien to me. No one in Portugal (different culture, remember?) would dream of letting their kids go and camp anywhere before their eighteenth or twentieth birthday. And even then, they would not let girls do so. There were also all sorts of idiosyncracies. They had no TV for instance. … But kids are adaptable. I knew I was reading about a different land, a different time, and I went along with it, captured by the characters and accepting the premisses of the world.
People who insist that Blyton or Heinlein or for that matter Agatha Christie must be modernized for “the younger generation” have been sold a bill of goods. Young people who won’t read Heinlein because “I grew up with computers, and his characters don’t have them, so they’re irrelevant” of course also can’t handle mythological tales, or stories of the middle ages. Or perhaps they’ve just been sold a bill of goods by the adults in their lives. Or perhaps… and this is the scary part, they’re so convinced of the rightness of the consensus reality these days, so absolutely sure that our prejudices, our beliefs, our thoughts about things are the right ones, that they don’t want to think society might have been organized differently once upon a time.
This is different – if you ask – from the type of strong moral (or immoral) code that can influence other people. For one, it’s more fragile. I can’t imagine anyone like Heinlein or Blyton refusing to read about other lands/people because “they aren’t like me.” They would probably judge the inhabitants of those worlds, fictional or not, according to their own lights (multiculturalism being a weak poison at the time) but they wouldn’t put their hands over their ears and refuse to hear about it. In fact, this attitude of “modernizing” books betrays a LACK of cultural confidence, and a lack of belief that this is what we should pass on to our children. It’s as though we’re (and here I’m talking society as a whole. Just like I am at home in the lowest greasy spoon and the highest gourmet restaurant, I can encompass literature from all eras, and my kids can as well) afraid our kids will find out things were organized differently once upon a time, will investigate why and will come to believe (oh, horrors!) those old norms.
In fact, the “updating” of books is another way of enforcing that consensus reality that the gatekeepers have been working so hard at. It’s a way of making sure that you hear nothing that makes you question “how things are done.”
It is in a way the same impulse that led to the endless revisions of history in 1984. “We have always been at war with Eurasia” means you shouldn’t consider that perhaps there is a specific reason for that war, and that maybe that war is wrong. “We have always had computers” and “it’s always been wrong to look down on gypsies” and “Women and men have always been equal” means you don’t think too hard about the way we live, and don’t consider HOW you could live.
You see what I mean about how that betrays a lack of cultural confidence? How what it shows is that people are afraid their kids will meet unexpurgated books that push thoughts that are no part of our “politically correct” reality? (Did you know that term comes from Maoism? It was supposed to denote something that was obviously wrong, but was “politically correct” – i.e. true to the ideology of Maoism.)
“Oh, come, Sarah,” you said. “Aren’t you getting al bent out of shape because some idiots gave The Famous Five computers? I mean, it’s not like they’re defacing Caesar’s Campaigns in Gaul! Perhaps kids like reading about other kids with computer games.”
Ah. But see, when you go in to “modernize” something it’s very easy to change the other stuff too – on purpose or not. Look, I’ve tried to revise a mystery that I wrote in the early eighties, and had it fall apart in my hand. It was impossible for that book to happen in a world in which you could google things. Modernizing something from the early twentieth century? You’re going to have to change essential parts. You’re just going to have to. And, of course, while you’re modernizing, you’re going to “correct” the attitudes of the characters.
No?
Okay, let me tell you a story. My older son, during one of our walks, brought up a book I couldn’t remember. He said something about a tree and “it was one of the books I read when I was little.” Well, he read EVERYTHING when he was little – kind of like a pulping machine will swallow everything – so I forgot about it.
Only he didn’t. Turns out that box of books had a few Enid Blytons I’d never read. Robert, in attempting to prove to me he’d not gone nuts and that there was a story out there that sounded like what he’d told me, went looking through the internet.
He found it. It’s The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. And then he found the paragraph on Wikipedia, talking about the “modernized” versions.
In modern reprints, the names of some of the characters have been changed. Jo has been changed to Joe, the more common spelling for males, and Bessie is now Beth, the former name having fallen out of usage as a nickname for Elizabeth. Fanny and Dick, whose names now carry unfortunate connotations, have been renamed Frannie and Rick. The character of Dame Slap has become Dame Snap, and no longer practises corporal punishment but instead reprimands her students by shouting at them.
I’ve never seen my son so shocked. Not the names, though changing the names is a goodly piece of nonsense. Again, children are not completely stupid, and it doesn’t hurt them to know that the slang terms weren’t always the same as they are now. On the contrary it gives them an idea of change and of time altering things. (Which of course will make them question the justness of our own versions of things.) But note that the character who practiced corporal punishment has been changed too, because G-d forbid our precious little sprouts would guess that once upon a time, and still throughout most of the world, corporal punishment is the norm in child rearing, and that generation upon generation have been raised that way without turning out any more dysfunctional than our own children?
If the precious moralists and revisionists HAD to do that and felt their own inherent superiority enough to do that – what else did they DO? What else is changed in those books?
I bet you EVERYTHING. Every attitude, every way of looking at the world. EVERYTHING that made those books powerful moral influences. If anything of that feeling remains, it is now in the service of the currently fashionable ideas – ideas like the ridiculous animism/new-primitive worship of the Earth (quite distinct from trying to keep a functional ecology), ideas like “we can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, even if they’re bad” ideas like “political correctness.”
My son said “WHY do that? Why keep the book, the shell of the book and change everything? That’s horrifying. Wouldn’t it be more honest to burn them and ban them? How dare they take the words of someone who is dead and can’t defend him/herself and make them into something OTHER?”
I agree with him. If you’re that diffident about your current ideas and attitudes that you don’t want children exposed to older ones, be honest about your insecurity and bigotry. Burn the books. Ban them. Yes, it will make you feel like a thug, a bully and a coward, but that just means you’re seeing yourself clearly. If that’s what you want to be, BE that.
But don’t hollow out a person’s ideas and thoughts and attitudes, fill them with your own consensus reality, and then sell it under that person’s name.
That’s repulsive. Grave robbers have better morals.
According To Hoyt 
Great post, as always, Sarah. You make my world a bigger (and more interesting) place!
LikeLike
Bowdlerization. The Memory Hole. Political Correctness. There’s a long tradition there.
But I want to take a tangent on this line: “For one, it’s more fragile. I can’t imagine anyone like Heinlein or Blyton refusing to read about other lands/people because “they aren’t like me.” They would probably judge the inhabitants of those worlds, fictional or not, according to their own lights (multiculturalism being a weak poison at the time) but they wouldn’t put their hands over their ears and refuse to hear about it.” Actually, I would consider Heinlein a TRUE multiculturalist, in ways modern multiculturalists wouldn’t recognize. It’s too early for me to recall precise quotes, but there’s the one about a female hippo being beautiful to another hippo. Then there’s the one about if everybody in the culture is rubbing blue mud in their navels, then you as a visitor should rub blue mud in your navel. And there are others, I forget details, where the Wise Old Man character chastised the Idealistic Young Man for judging the world through his prejudices. Jubal Harshaw was perhaps the ultimate example there; and yet even Jubal had to learn that lesson again from Mike.
I think Heinlein clearly had his own cultural preferences; but he also recognized that other preferences had validity unless they hurt someone. Another line I can’t recall precisely: “The only sin consists of hurting other people. Hurting yourself isn’t sinful, it’s just stupid.”
LikeLike
Of course. But I meant current “everyone is equal except us, who are evil” multiculti. It’s actually oikophobia. Actually the current generation reminds me of Heinlein’s quote about how only a savage thinks the rules of his culture apply across the universe. (I too can’t remember the quote precisely.) It’s the same thing of thinking they apply across all times.
LikeLike
Amen.
LikeLike
Its from Bernard Shaw. Let’s see how well I get it from memory:
Brittanicus: Caesar, this is not proper!
Caesar: Forgive him Theodotus. He’s a barbarian, and thinks the customs of his tribe are laws of nature.
Okay, almost: “Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”
It’s from Caesar and Cleopatra. Quoted as an epigraph in Glory Road.
LikeLike
yes, but he also says it in another way in passing.
LikeLike
Thanks – that is a bit o’ dialogue which has stayed with me for decades, so long and so familiar I regularly forget whence I learned it. Glory Road, eh? Time to reread that with the advantage of some forty additional years of living.
LikeLike
Maybe for me, too. That one was never much of a favorite of mine.
LikeLike
Y’all just HAD to go and start talking about quotes from Glory Road, didn’t you? I went searching for that quote, didn’t find it, but guess what I DID find?
http://www.albion-swords.com/swords/albion/late/sword-lady-vivamus.htm
Do you know how much I am hating life right now? Hrumph.
LikeLike
OMG.
All I’d do is cut myself. And I can’t afford it. But God in Heaven that’s a gorgeous hunk of metal.
LikeLike
If a body has problems with “different” cultures and requires the characters live identifiable, recognizable lives … why is that person reading SF????????????????
LikeLike
Problem is, “Multiculturalism” as it’s practiced today is not the, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” that you’re referring to, it’s, “We can’t expect someone who moved here to conform to our rules! They have their own that they live by, and we must respect them.”
LikeLike
That’s a good way of thinking about it: it’s almost exactly inverted. It’s cultural self-loathing.
LikeLike
The hippo quote, comes out of I Will Fear No Evil, I am reading it right now and just read that last night, “A lady hippopotamus must look beautiful to her boyfriend, or we would run out of hippopotamuses–potami, in one generation.”
I think that book shows more of Hienlien’s multiculturism than any other I’ve read. It’s just that the current popular definition of ‘multiculturism’ just like the current definition of ‘liberal’ bears no resemblance to the dictionary definition.
LikeLike
You may all sigh with relief. I just deleted a very long “me too, and here’s what happened to me that was similar!” bit that would have left everybody crosseyed. I agree, Sarah. There are books that mould us and make us the people we become. It was an utter delight to me to finally meet (via the internet) other people who’d read and loved Enid Blyton. Because I’d never met *anyone* else until just a few years ago — now I know two: One grew up in Portugal (waves at Sarah) and the other grew up in South Africa (waves at Dave Freer). I grew up in South Omaha, at least as culturally distant from Britain between the wars as either of those places! But the idea that people are taking her books and *changing* them makes me angry. I hope to God that nobody decides to ‘update’ Have Space Suit – Will Travel!
Thanks, Sarah. Well done!
LikeLike
I hope to God that nobody decides to ‘update’ Have Space Suit – Will Travel!
Oh Lin, what a horrible, terrible, very bad idea! Heaven forefend!
LikeLike
Heh, I grew up in west Omaha for a few years.
LikeLike
3
LikeLike
But Lin, we know so much more about spacesuits now. And Kip uses a sliderule, for chrissake!!! How can anybody take the novel seriously with that kind of stuff distracting them?? All we want to do is update for modern materials technology to more accurately present the requirements of spacesuiting. And replace the slipstick with a pocket calculator. and, uh, maybe change that stuff about Kip’s school being a glorified baby-sitting service … I mean, education is soooo important and adding an enlightened teacher to help guide Kip would really encourage kids to more actively participate in their school functions. And all that stuff about Kip’s after school job at the drug store doesn’t reflect modern pharmaceutical merchandising (who even knows what a soda jerk is?) and some of that stuff, like the use of amphetamines, might instill some seriously dangerous attitudes …. /sarcasm
LikeLike
Since I *remember* the first tests, let alone the Mercury, et al, programs, and since I learned how to do math with a slide rule… those are all nostalgia for me ;-) I’m waiting for Jules Verne to be “modernized” (I do enjoy League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but that’s not a ‘modernization’ so much as taking the character out for a joy ride ;-) )
LikeLike
I devoured the Famous Five books as a kid, too. Hm, the constant descriptions of delicious food may have had slightly unfortunate influences on a little girl who tended towards pudgy, but that usually lasted only for the duration of reading.
So now you know one in Finland, too.
LikeLike
Gah. They actually did that? (No, I’m not questioning your veracity, Sarah, I’m just in the “denial” stage of a shocked reaction.)
Wow. I think I’ve just discovered a worse crime than abridging novels.
Though, to be honest, I can think of a novel or two that should have been abridged: Moby Dick, for example, would have been a much better book if the fiction chapters (the ones about a sea captain obsessed with a white whale) had been separated from the non-fiction chapters (the ones containing a treatise on the anatomy of whales and the methods by which whale oil was extracted).
LikeLike
The “whiteness” chapter. “Hermie, baby, we get it: the whale’s white. It’s Important that it’s white. We get it. Get on with the damn story.”
Don’t start me with Marcel Proust and his goddamn cookie.
LikeLike
Uh, Tom Clancy, there’s a reason his books make great movies, they have good story lines, he just adds so much extraneous stuff (as far as I can tell simply to up the word count) that I can’t read them.
LikeLike
I felt the same thing when I read this. “Oh lud, is that a thing?”
Certainly, I’d heard of a few instances of it in the sense of either, “Remove these offensive N words from Twain.” or “Let’s write new Nancy Drew books set in modern era!” But I’d never heard of it being done to that extent.
Disgusting.
I learned so many things from reading childrens’ books meant for children of an entirely different era. I’m including the original Nancy Drew books, the Narnia stories, and certainly more that I just can’t think of off the cuff.
My niece will get a proper reading education.
LikeLike
There are indeed Modern Day Nancy Drew books around. The manga-style ones intrigued me, but not enough to buy them. (I went off Nancy Drew when I realized — probably after reading 3 of them back to back in perhaps twice as many hours — that they all followed the same plot. In particular, at the end, Nancy always found the key information, got captured, and had to be rescued by someone. I never read another Nancy Drew book again after that; Nancy was awesome and should be able to get her own darn self out of trouble without help at least some of the time!)
LikeLike
Just like I am at home in the lowest greasy spoon and the highest gourmet restaurant
Ooooo, just like Archie Goodwin! But who could be your Nero? ;-)
Thank you for yet another good post.
LikeLike
In fact, the “updating” of books is another way of enforcing that consensus reality that the gatekeepers have been working so hard at. It’s a way of making sure that you hear nothing that makes you question “how things are done.”
Keeping the world safe from alternative ideas? YES! I guess they expect parents and grand parents who fondly recall the books from their childhood to buy these ‘versions’ unchecked and unquestioned.
I cannot begin to imagine how some of my childhood favorites could be ‘modernized.’ Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter as a story of nearly a week of isolation, discomfort, no Internet!, no Texting! and no games after the batteries run out — all because of a terrible storm created by man made global warming? Great, just great … NOT!
LikeLike
You may be too naive.
It needn’t be insecurity about current values that is behind the rewriting to put “modern” values into old books/characters. As you have pointed out, these older stories were powerful influencers of the young. One who fervently believes in his “modern” values and wants to inculcate those values into others’ children might do this subversively, offensively rather than defensively. Let’s be glad when they aren’t very good at it.
Or maybe I am just too cynical.
LikeLike
A person can be too cynical???? I suspect not.
LikeLike
Ah … the series that I deeply adored and absorbed so many core values from was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Read them over and over, learned about what life on the upper Plains frontier was like in the 1880s. Read about grasshopper plagues, using horses rather than automobile engines, and kerosene lanterns rather than electric lights, one-room schoolhouses, blizzards and the dangers of licking a pump handle in winter … although to my knowlege in this life I have never seen a blizzard or a winter- frozen pump handle . I could not imagine them being ‘updated’, dumbed down or made politically correct. It would be a travesty.
LikeLike
Agree on the Little House books. They’re fabulous. And were also among my “re-re-re-read”. As were Rosemary Stewart’s juvies about the history of Britian (from preshistory, through the Romans, an onward). Funny, but her ‘adult’ books never resonated with me the same way.
LikeLike
And were also among my “re-re-re-read”.
For a number of years the first thing I did once school was out was re-read my way through the Little House books. One thing I noticed, what I saw in the stories changed as I grew. By the time I first shared them with The Daughter I saw things through Ma’s eyes as well.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice books were my other constant companion. I loved the word and logic games. When I was older and started learning British history I began to get some of the politics as well.
LikeLike
Who is this Stewart? I am reminded of Rosemary, IIRC, Sutecliff, who wrote in a similar time frame, and was pretty well grounded historically. (I also remember a Viking novel, an Arthurian for adults which I didn’t care for,and maybe a bronze age mid eastern thingy.)
LikeLike
“our “politically correct” reality? (Did you know that term comes from Maoism? It was supposed to denote something that was obviously wrong, but was “politically correct” – i.e. true to the ideology of Maoism.)”
I didn’t know this, but I find it appropriately chilling.
For me, growing up, it was the Oz books (when I was younger; later I moved into Lloyd Alexander, Narnia and King Arthur. And horse stories.) Very few of the characters are even human and the strongest human (or human-looking) characters are female, both good and evil, yet boys loved these books as much as girls did. (Baum did some interesting stuff with gender. In one non-Oz book, there’s a child character named Chick the Cherub, and it’s not until the end of the book that it’s pointed out that no one knows if Chick is a girl or a boy. Baum ran a national contest for kids to write an essay about why Chick might be either; two kids won (a boy and a girl), each claiming Chick for their gender. But hey, the 1900s, they were just so backward, right?)
Thank goodness for Project Gutenberg, bringing back old faves I’d never heard of, but my dad remembered, in all their unexpurgated glory.
LikeLike
I always expected the world between a book’s covers to be different than my own–that’s why I was *reading* it! So I accepted lorries and torches and ginger-beer, or doublets and rapiers and civet, or mysterious ladies with fox tails and river monsters with bowl-shaped skulls. Not *together*, of course. That’s kinda like mixing your drinks–it seems good at the time but introduces you to a world of regret ;-) (And now one of you fine people will go haring off with a wild cry to write about a kitsune who drinks ginger-beer and takes a part in a Shakespeare reinactment troupe. Just to prove me wrong.)
LikeLike
I could so totally do this. But ONLY if there are also musketeers.
LikeLike
Yeah!
LikeLike
Well, she did say doublets and rapiers.
LikeLike
Lin wrote: It was an utter delight to me to finally meet (via the internet) other people who’d read and loved Enid Blyton. Because I’d never met *anyone* else until just a few years ago — now I know two: One grew up in Portugal (waves at Sarah) and the other grew up in South Africa (waves at Dave Freer). I grew up in South Omaha, at least as culturally distant from Britain between the wars as either of those places!
Hi Lin, I spent a big chunk of my childhood in Thailand, where I read and re-read Enid Blyton. I especially loved the boarding school series. That’s also where I discovered Heinlein, too, but didn’t get most of the juveniles until we came back to the States.
I’m really loving this blog.
LikeLike
I imprinted on the unexpurgated Grimm’s fairy tales, the colored fairy books, and Kipling, followed by the Pern novels and a Valdemar chaser. And all the WWII histories I could get my little paws on. I can not abide the “kinder, gentler” fairy tale revisions – what’s the point of going on a great adventure if all you end up doing is scolding the ogre into being a good citizen? Fie on that, sirrah!
LikeLike
Yes, the Andrew Lang color fairy books! Awesome stuff! And Howard Pyle! (That’s where I got my love of those wonderful Victorian illustrators.)
LikeLike
Lang, Pyle, Ransome, Then there were the E Nesbitt tales, the Princess & Curdie (I have vague recollection of a cartoon adaptation of them but cannot recall if it was a horrid bowdlerization or a loving homage.) Bullfinch was a favourite. B’rer Rabbit. Burroughs’ Tarzan sidling in to Opar.
There is some kind of clever word play on “Lost Worlds” then and now, but it hangs tantalizingly out of my grasp.
LikeLike
“Princess and Curdie” – my fave George MacDonald is The Light Princess, followed by Princess and the Goblin, but P&C is the one I have stolen from the most, despite how didactic it is. Victorians do the best fantasy. And the best horror.
LikeLike
Oh, the Uncle Remus stories (Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Bear, Br’er Fox et al.) are probably some of the first to have been totally revamped. Disney’s Song of the South was derived straight from the Uncle Remus tales, and DISNEY HAS TAKEN IT OUT OF CIRCULATION. You cannot, nor will ever be able to again, buy a copy of Song of the South. It is too “racist.” Never mind they were modern (to the time) morality tales along the lines of Aesop’s Fables. Heaven forbid we should depict things as they actually were. (Same thing goes for Disney’s update of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride to make it more politically correct. Mustn’t show the pirates chasing the women to rape them or auctioning them off or drowning the mayor or preparing to kill the commandant of the fortress.)
LikeLike
Uncle Remus stories were among my very first reads. LOVELY illustrated edition. In Portuguese, of course.
LikeLike
It started long before Disney ever got hold of it. I have an original edition of the stories and you have to read them out loud to understand what the characters are saying because the dialect is true to the time. It makes what we see now look like modern lit.
LikeLike
I think you’re too kind. The “foul unscrupulous modi-fye-ors” (Paul Stookey) are cultural vandals, every bit as despicable to civilized minds as those taliban who shot cannons at the Buddha statues. They deserve the back of every thinking person’s hand.
At least they didn’t bowldlerize Joel Chandler Harris, (unless you count Disney, which I do, on alternate Wednesdays, especially when it comes to Kipling and Milne).
M
LikeLike
No, Disney doesn’t count. That studio is a special case which destroys every tale it lays hand to, converting them into something entirely different and bearing only coincidental resemblance to the original. Listing the crimes would entail listing pretty much every film based on outside material Disney has ever made. A much shorter list would be Disney films that respect their source material:
LikeLike
Hah! A very short list, I see. I’ve never been able to decide if it was the Disney version of the Jungle Book, or the Disney version of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books which bore the least resemblance of all to the original material.
LikeLike
I might argue Mary Poppins most betrays the source material (surely PL Travers thought that) but the Alice adaptation is soooo bad … perhaps it is merely an argument over whether the stew is made worse by adding horse dung, cattle dung or pig dung: no matter which you choose it is still a load of crap.
Were the original Winnie the Pooh not so bad or am I just enamored of Sterling Holloway’s narration?
LikeLike
I can forgive a lot for a Sterling Holloway performance, but not what Disney did to either Pooh or the Jungle Books.
Of course, no voice actor could ever equal Mom’s readings.
M
LikeLike
Oh, guh, the Disney Jungle Book travesty… I saw that a while back, and wrote a review of it; basically, it’s not only not true to the books, but it’s not true to itself, and that’s an even worse flaw. Miyazaki’s version of Howl’s Moving Castle has some huge deviations from the book — but it is internally true to itself. Disney’s Mulan has a fair amount of internal consistency (and a friend’s Chinese (if I recall correctly!) parents didn’t mind the rendition, for what that’s worth), as does their Hamlet, er Lion King. (Lion King II is actually not bad, and surprisingly, Little Mermaid II has some interestingly good bits; LM2 suffers most for being two stories (Coming Of Age Daughter/Protective Mother) jammed together into too little time, but I have a soft spot for the ol’ married couple smooching at the end, ‘kay?)
LikeLike
As an historian, I’m torn between Pocahontas (actual, living person) and Anastasia (actual, living person). Wait… maybe Disney didn’t do Anastasia? (seeing previews on a screen in the lobby of a movie theater was enough for me to know to avoid it!)
LikeLike
Lin,
As a kid, I was furious when the history teacher showed Pocahontas in class. Wiki suggests that the other movie you mention was made by Fox.
LikeLike
Disney didn’t do Anastasia; that was 20th Century Fox. Had some very nice musical numbers!
LikeLike
I do prefer it when Disney sticks to fairy tales or original stories. :-P Disney’s Jungle Book at least has good songs. I can’t bear to watch Disney’s Prydain, but those were very special books to me.
Very sad story about Prydain. Disney wanted Black Cauldron to be their big come-back movie (I actually talked to an animator when this was all first being talked about, he was so enthusiastic). They even had Lloyd Alexander himself write a screenplay, and had given the project to a promising young team of animators. Only a new Young Turk, who had just done the dreadful Oliver and Co, demanded Black Cauldron, and Disney felt forced to give it to him or he was going to leave. He threw out Alexander’s screenplay and it became what we all saw. Some of you might remember that a big chunk of Disney’s animators walked out in disgust halfway through.
That promising young team who were supposed to do it originally? They went on to do The Great Mouse Detective, which really was the turn-around movie for Disney. Little Mermaid followed.
LikeLike
Sorry, not Oliver and co, but Fox and the Hound.
LikeLike
I’ll never forgive them for The Little Mermaid.
LikeLike
Being a child who had actually read at least two variations on The Little Mermaid when Disney’s version came to theaters, it did take me awhile (like, decades) to forgive them for what they did to it.
Eventually, I realized if I hated Disney for it, then I’d be a hypocrite seeing as I intend to rewrite fairy tales myself. (I have a few in-progress works I’ll likely have to rewrite entirely.) Some people may read my version of the Princess and the Pea (which I always felt was “visually” superior to most fairy tales, but lacking in interesting people) and howl over there actually being characters there rather than a joke dressed up like a fairy tale.
After that, I was able to watch adaptations without problem. Though I still cringe over book adaptations. (The movie that helped me there was “Ella Enchanted” – which was a superior little book and the movie was like it only superficially. There was more resemblance between Disney’s Little Mermaid and the original than there was to Ella Enchanted. But, I came to realize, the movie was fun for what it was and grudgingly let it exist.)
LikeLike
You know, hypocritical is a label that has NEVER bothered me. And besides, you’re misapplying it. I don’t object to their doing a version of the little mermaid. I object to their calling it The Little Mermaid. If they’d called it “Under the Sea, based on The Little Mermaid” I’d be completely cool with that. Presumably if people buy a modern fantasy book about the princess and the pea, they KNOW it’s not the original tale, particularly if it has characters. I mean, I’ve raped (WHAT? What would you call it?) the three musketeers five ways from Monday, and will probably do so again, but I call it Death of A Musketeer or Sword and Blood, NOT Dumas, the Three Musketeers. (And there’s ANOTHER one I’ll never forgive. Athos reconciles with Milady! Porthos is a pirate! And the real issue? IDIOT editors and copyeditors keep trying to correct my books to match the original. … by which of course, they mean the movies.)
LikeLike
That’s fair enough. xD And I was probably misapplying the word. *nods*
Also: *major wince* re: correcting the story to be like the movies. Ugh.
LikeLike
I dunno. Disney collaborated with Square on Kingdom Hearts, and from what I can tell, the other Square characters that were folded in were treated respectfully.
Maybe that doesn’t count, because it is someone else using Disney’s property under license.
LikeLike
I’m not particularly concerned about Disney. First, adaptations are a bit of a different beast than expurgations and the like. Complaining that an adaptation isn’t “true” to the original would mean complaining that Romeo and Juliet doesn’t have song and dance numbers, the two great families were not street gangs, and Juliet dies at the end (I hope that didn’t spoil it for anyone ;)) when discussing West Side Story.
When Disney makes a movie they aren’t making Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” or Grimm’s “Sleeping Beauty” or Carrol’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” or what have you. They are making a Disney Movie(TM) which uses certain elements of those stories as a “springboard” from which to create the Disney Movie(TM).
It’s a valid form. It may not appeal to everyone but, well, considering Disney’s success it apparently appeals to a lot of people.
LikeLike
See my comment above re: Song of the South, actually. I think it did not go this direction until after we lost Walt.
LikeLike
No, P. L. Travers (according to a recent article in London’s Telegraph) detested what they did to Mary Poppins. Interestingly, she did not blame Julie Andrews, who had been willing to play a physically unattractive Mary.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/9195930/Story-of-how-Mary-Poppins-author-regretted-selling-rights-to-Disney-to-be-turned-into-film.html
LikeLike
You are all making me very happy that Daddy and Momma simply did not do Disney films. We were going to go see Mary Poppins because Julie Andrews was in it. (They knew about her stellar stage performance as Miss Dolittle.) They decided that no Disney film was worth lines that went all the way around a big city block, even with Ms. Andrews..
LikeLike
Part of our (accidental) homeschooling consisted of going to the library every two weeks, with the three small children, and loading up a cart with somewhere between 100 and 200 books, mostly from the children’s section. We’d lug them home, and they would all get read, many of them by all four of us.
When I discovered that the Hardy Boys had been ‘modernized’ – and filled with violence, antifeminism, and things like terrorists, I made darn sure to check the copyright date before letting any of those into the cart. What appalled me at the time was that there was no warning on the new, horrible ones – and the librarian didn’t seem to care.
I thought it was criminal to slip these things in on children by trading on the appeal of the old name to the parents. To say nothing about the ridiculousness of having teenagers stop terrorists.
ABE
PS The kids are fine. They read anything they want to now, but it was totally inappropriate for a bright seven-year-old who COULD read to run across – and the original Hardy Boys were fine.
LikeLike
Ah, er, ummmmm … the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and all the output of that particular shop have been subject to revision pretty much since day 1 and therefore constitute a special case, an exception to the rules against revisionism … which isn’t to say I approve; every “updated” version of one of those books ought have a warning label. But those books have undergone such a process of constant revisionism that a longitudinal study of them would provide material for a doctoral thesis on the sociology of contemporary culture over the last century.
Tom Swift is probably the sole exception, as advances in science made “updating” of the books impossible and forced them to go multigenerational.
LikeLike
I rather liked the first twenty or so Hardy Boys books. Recently I was at a used bookstore and saw “Hardy Boys: the Mystery of the Black Rhino.” Unfortunately, I’d had no idea of how stupid the books had become.
There were many, many issues, but one of the worst was a complete dearth of physical description. Not of features, race, hair color — yes, that’s right, a Hardy Boys book set in Africa where every character including the main ones are apparently identical, save for the most basic “teen,” “woman,” “man,” and an occasional “old,” “young,” or “pretty.” Disguises play an enormous part in the plot, which makes it worse; apparently if two white boys dress in hooded clothing, they are magically unable to be detected when Nairobi’s finest are looking for them.
That, and the violence, the incredible sense of entitlement the main characters had, and the random events (multiple engines fail on a plane just so everyone can panic and the boys can save the day by, that’s right, repairing the landing gear mid-flight) that tried to pass rather miserably for a plot… I know the originals were ghostwritten by multiple authors. That’s fine with me; they were good. These modern ones are dreck.
LikeLike
I didn’t realize the new ones were revisions of the old ones, since they all were ghost written, I thought they were just newer books by different ghost writers, and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew have always been written in the current time period (current as of the time each individual book was written). I agree the new ones suck compared to the old ones. I had some that I recently gave to my little cousins that I got as a kid out of my grandma’s attic. In those books Chet drove a jalopy, and cars and airplanes were relatively newfangled. (I remember having to ask my grandma what a jalopy was)
LikeLike
Farley’s Black Stallion books and the Trixie Belden series (Nancy Drew was too uppity for me) were my second and third grade obsessions. But Jonathon Livingston Seagull and Lord of the Flies ( I identified w/ Simon–still do, I guess) were the books that hit me in the solar plexus. I think I was 11 when I read them. Had a big discussion in catechism class on Jonathon LIvingston Seagull–a positive discussion, btw. with a New Age-leaning nun the leading the discussion.
LikeLike
But Jonathon Livingston Seagull and Lord of the Flies ( I identified w/ Simon–still do, I guess) were the books that hit me in the solar plexus.
The first ‘grown-up’ book I clearly recall making an impact was Animal Farm. I had pulled it off Daddy’s bookshelves. It had characters who were animals in it, so I decided to read it. There was so much to think about. Various images stuck, such as the horse willingly overworking himself and then going to the knackers, all the while thinking that he was doing it for the good of the farm. I knew that this book was talking about VERY IMPORTANT ideas.
LikeLike
Sheesh. Sometimes the kids can get odd cultural references faster than us. When my kids were probably old enough to do their reading on their own, they still liked me to read to them, probably because I try fairly hard to be expressive of the character’s emotions when reading. Once I read them Robinson Crusoe (and let me tell you, the language barrier for reading that book aloud without so much faltering that it’s a waste of time is a real B!%*# with a capital ‘B’!). After the shipwreck, he talks about using “iron crows” to open doors and tear holes in walls to get supplies. I couldn’t figure out for myself what he was talking about, but my oldest son said, “Crowbars, dad”. Once he said that, the great light dawned, and the dunce cap appeared on my head. DUH! But it just shows that I was looking at it wrong, and a less rigid mind could see more clearly.
LikeLike
I’m reminded of a post I got partway towards putting together on another forum, and then, IIRC, decided to cut, for content reasons.
You expect to see an old friend, and for them to put on a show dancing. Instead, you find some person playing around with the flayed skin of your beloved friend.
Here, they are maybe wrapping the skin around a sack of compost, and trying to tell you that they haven’t killed the friend.
I had originally wanted to describe the horror of a really bad movie adaptation of a loved book.
As a kid, I was not at all interested in reading about kids like myself. “Bob is an anxious boy, largely dependent upon his parents. He reads, watches TV, and is bothered by things he cannot articulate.” Dull. Dull. Dull.
Stuff that was very alien to my mores, or how I lived my life was not a problem. Stuff that is written by someone who cares so little about it that they could rip out the guts and not realize that it is dead would have been a problem.
LikeLike
Excellent and thoughtful essay.
I’ve mentioned it before, but this post so strongly highlights the underlying notions of C.S. Lewis’ essay “Men Without Chests” that it bears repeating. I’m sure Lewis and Heinlein would have never thought themselves on the same side of anything, save humanity. Yet, they breathed the same air and shared the same culture. When men have no chests, they lack the confidence of their convictions and respond to arguments with “shut up” as Andrew Klavan has observed. Robert Heinlein had a chest and because he had a chest he could say things offensive to both left and right simultaneously. Not because they were offensive, but because they were true.
It should be noted that Heinlein, Ayn Rand, and C.S. Lewis depicted a consistent set of morals and values despite having radically different theologies. So, this is not mere Baptist bible thumping when we speak of their writing being “moral.” The insecurity of today’s bowlderizers is seen in their denial that they are pushing their own distinct morality. Yet it is there and their faux tolerance evaporates when confronting morals and values foundational to western civilization.
That you should draw a parallel between “1984” and “modernizing” works is chilling. I was the weird kid in High School who read “Pilgrim’s Progress” in the original prose as resistant to contemporary comprehension as Shakespeare’s. So, don’t try to palm off that “the text must be modernized” crap on me. (Not that you were, i’m referring to your liberal-fascist interlocutors.) The fact that it was not modernized, and that it was hard, was exactly what drew me to the text. (Every child should read with a dictionary close at hand.) Kids like to engage hard targets and winning over them, is one way they grow into men with chests.
LikeLike
Steve, I’m afraid that there have been other unfortunate examples of Christian publishing houses “modernizing” works, besides Pilgrim’s Progress. Several of George MacDonald’s Highland novels have been retitled and rewritten, and it’s hard to find the originals. And there was an extraordinary “special edition” of The Screwtape Letters which eliminated Germany and the Axis as the enemies in the war going on, WW2. Fortunately, I think the original text is the only one being published now. And Fahrenheit 451, of all books, was rewritten a few words at a time over the years, so gradually that Bradbury didn’t notice till a fan brought it to his attention.
LikeLike
There is, of course, the special rewrite of Huck Finn without “N” word .
Another reason that publishers have ‘updated’ — not one that they tout — I believe that the new updated version gains them a copy right.
LikeLike
Yes, taking the ‘N’ word out of Huck Finn is much like rewriting history, which if you look at a current school history book you’ll see has been done so much that you may not even recognize it. I have read fictional alternate history books that had more relationship to true history than the current history text books.
I also find it ironic and disturbing that while books containing the ‘F’ word and such are perfectly acceptable in grade school libraries, Huck Finn is not because it contains the ‘N’ word.
LikeLike
It is an odd puritanical impulse that embraces the “F” word and gets the vapors over the “N” word.
LikeLike
Not that I want to endorse political correctness, but I think there’s no contradiction there at all from their naturalistic, relativistic mindset. The “F” word denotes a natural act that they see as never wrong in any circumstances between consenting adults. The “N” word they associate with an unnatural, immoral enslavement of one people by another.
It’s also a question of who gets offended by the words. The “F” word offends exactly the puritans they wish to offend, while the “N” word offends people they feel have suffered too much already.
LikeLike
Martin, Actually the enslavement of one people by another is PERFECTLY natural. Not moral. Not good. But natural in humans (and some of the other great apes.) Just saying. I’m glad industrialization seems to have broken the back of that particular monster.
LikeLike
At one point industrialization kept slavery going. American tobacco crops had drained the soil, and at the end of the eighteenth century competitors undercut the prices. Cotton was hard on the soil and labor intensive as well. It had come to the point in this country where the amount of labor involved you could not make the crop pay. It looked like slavery might become too unprofitable to maintain. The development of the mills in New England raised the demand for cotton. That, combined with the invention of the cotton gin made growing cotton highly profitable. (Mechanical harvesters were not developed until much later.)
LikeLike
yes. These things move by fits and starts, as I said.
LikeLike
Yup, change not move steadily in on direction and there will be surprises.
It would be good to keep this in mind the next time someone tells us something is settled. (They may be right, but they could be wrong. Of course, as you also observed when the they that is telling has control over consensus building they will try and make it so.))
LikeLike
It is also worth contemplating that the inventor of the cotton gin also invented the mass production of rifles with interchangeable parts, a major factor in the Union’s victory in the War of Southern Secession.
LikeLike
” Young people who won’t read Heinlein because “I grew up with computers, and his characters don’t have them, so they’re irrelevant””
My response to that would be:
“What do you mean his characters don’t have them? Some of his characters ARE them. Oh, sorry – never heard of AI, have you?” Sigh… Pallas Athena, forgive them, they know not what they say…
LikeLike
After thinking it over more, I consider the only — the ONLY — acceptable form of “updating the language” to be when the original is so old that the “updating” is really translation. Shakespeare? No, that’s Early Modern English, entirely comprehensible to anyone with access to a dictionary (or who grew up reading the King James Bible). No “updates” needed. Chaucer? Well, an intelligent reader who really wants to read Middle English could puzzle it out laboriously one word at a time, but to really understand it you need an “update” (really a translation) into Modern English. Beowulf? Forget trying to read it in the original — you* can’t. Only scholars speak (or read) Old English any more: 99.9% of readers require a translation into Modern English to even understand a single word.
* That’s the generic “you”, of course. It would not surprise me one bit to find among the readers of this blog at least one person who can read Beowulf in the original. I very much doubt I’d find two, though.
P.S. Oh good, it looks like the “Notify me of follow-up comments via email” option is back to defaulting to the sensible default of OFF.
LikeLike
I read Chaucer in the original version, while in school, I can’t recall why I did now, but do recall that I liked it, and that it was very difficult to read.
Beowulf on the other hand, I saw an untranslated version of it one time, I didn’t recognize it as English :)
LikeLike
I don’t mind rewriting old tales so long as they are clear as to what they’re about. Otherwise what they’re doing is a form of grave-robbing.
I am envisioning a SF tale in which all books have been run through the correctorizer … and an underground exists restoring the original content. Probably a Twilight Zone episode.
LikeLike
“I am envisioning a SF tale in which all books have been run through the correctorizer . . .”
_Remake_ by Connie Willis. About old movies, but the same idea.
LikeLike
Robin, I don’t think Chaucer needs an update at all. Not only have I written an additional Canturbury Tale in the Middle English (which Kerlak Pub is supposed to put out at SOME point), but I’ve tutored in it fairly extensively. I always told my students to read it aloud if they came to a confusing passage. It is essentially spelled phonetically and if you read it aloud with the cadence following the poem’s structure, it suddenly comes alive and makes perfect sense.
Beowulf is indeed another kettle of fish. I have read it, in its original, but it’s a bloody headache.
LikeLike
Much like some of Scott’s work, like Waverly and Rob Roy, much of it is written in brogue, and very hard to read, unless you read it phonetically (sound it out) then it is plain and adds an interesting character and depth.
LikeLike
RE: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales I always told my students to read it aloud if they came to a confusing passage. It is essentially spelled phonetically and if you read it aloud with the cadence following the poem’s structure, it suddenly comes alive and makes perfect sense.
I agree. The first time I encountered The Canterbury Tales was when a professor read one out loud.
Shakespeare’s plays are also far better out loud, they were meant to be performed.
LikeLike
It plays havoc with those of us with hearing problems. TRUST me. Sitting there, trying to pronounce and hear at once… it… gah. JUST trust me.
LikeLike
The book has elements which may be unfamiliar to a modern audience?
That is why Footnotes were created, you bilious, scum-sucking, mush-mouthed *MORONS*!
LikeLike
Perfect solution: Clone and Braintape Sir Terry Pratchett, and set one of the clones to footnoting “historical” texts. Profit!
LikeLike
This type of bowdlerization inclines me toward believing we’re striving for Stalin’s goal: A world in which everyone is literate in order to read the party’s diktats, but unwilling to read anything more. How better to achieve that than teach people to read but also that there is no pleasure in reading?
LikeLike
Oh that’s already been done. Our kids today – the majority have no interest whatsoever in reading. They read what they have to, to get by, and that’s it. Testament to that is a teenager who was in one of my panel discussions (books vs. film adaptations) who flatly declared he didn’t read (not that he couldn’t, just didn’t), and who afterward came to my booth, scanned over my books with his nose turned up, then took one of my business cards and asked if I would autograph it.
I promptly made a rule that I only autograph my books.
LikeLike
Beggin’ th’ Lady’s pardon – I was insufficiently clear. My question was not over whether we were achieving such end, only whether it was deliberate or “happy” byproduct.
Ah well, the fewer people reading the more stuff available for me to read, right? (Is that not the logic of their economic theories? The one percent hog all the reading, leaving the rest of us deprived?)
LikeLike
Stephanie, sorry, but that’s a pile of bull. Most kids do read and they enjoy it. They just aren’t reading what we expect them to. They are reading online, they are reading e-books, they are reading tech magazines, etc. I’m sorry, but I’ve run up against this attitude in too many teachers and it is the same attitude I see in legacy publishing about why they don’t publish more middle grade and young YA novels.
I can go on about this, but instead I’ll just suggest that instead of assigning something to the majority of kids that isn’t necessarily true, we, as authors, try to find stories these kids want to read and write them.
I am sorry you had the encounter you talked of. Those happen with adults as well. I’ve seen it happen just the way you described at cons, except the speaker was a 40-something or a 50-something. And you know what you find out if you talk to them long enough? You find out that they were turned off books by the literati and politically correct balderdash coming out of New York. They want books that entertain, not that preach. But I’m hijacking the thread and will get off my soapbox now.
LikeLike
I think kids are MORE literate now than in our time. They have to be, to communicate online. And if you stand between my kids and a Heinlein or a Pratchett, you’ll get flattened. They just HATE the stuff they’re given at school. HATE it. I don’t blame them either.
LikeLike
Did anyone else start with ERB? The first novel I remember reading, around the age 8 or so, was a 30´s translation of ‘Tarzan and the Golden Lion’ which I found in the attic when visiting a friend. It was her father’s, and he lent it to me. And later the other Tarzans he had, I think there were 9 or so, but since I realized the rest of the series could be found at the library I don’t remember anymore which I first read as those older translations and which as the library 60’s translations.
But I can still remember reading that first novel. Until then I had thought that reading was dull. The stuff we were reading in school, and what was available there, and what the teacher and the ladies in the library pushed for us the couple of times we visited, was mostly very educational – hey, 60’s, about the time when the idea that kids should mostly read stories about real life issues was first really starting to take hold in Finland. So stories about how Leena helped mom with cleaning, and how some nice little boy in Africa was also learning to read and do math. And some depressing stuff about subjects like ‘what can you do about pollution’ and so on. And Kalevala, a version recently made for kids, which meant retold, thoroughly cleaned stories (not in verse) with lots of very ugly pictures.
‘Tarzan and the Golden Lion’ was such a revelation. Africa, old times, lost lands and forgotten cities, a pet lion who will kill on command… there are books like this!
LikeLike
I never started with ERB but he was one of the first several authors that wrote full-size ‘adult’ novels that I read. (I say adult but rereading them now they seem more YA) I was wondering about translations since I notice no difference between the originals I own and the newer (50’s-70’s) PB’s I own, then you mentioned Finland and I realized they were translations into another language. Did they change the content in the newer translations? The problem with translations is always that it is so easy for the translator to change content to agree with his biases ,sometimes unintentionally, he thinks, “hey, ERB meant this, but its confusing that way, what he really should have said is this, that is much clearer.” When possibly it may be clearer but that is not what ERB meant at all. Words and ideas don’t always translate directly across the language barrier, so important things should be studied either in their original language, or in multiple translations. This is the main reason why preachers and priests study latin and sometimes hebrew, so they can translate themselves since no two people will translate exactly the same.
LikeLike
This thread pretty much embodies why, if Paul Verhoeven were smart, he would preemptively get a restraining order against me. He does NOT want me and my steel-toed boots getting within 150 yards of his shins!
LikeLike
I started reading here for the stories but I really enjoy your posts.
“But don’t hollow out a person’s ideas and thoughts and attitudes, fill them with your own consensus reality, and then sell it under that person’s name.” This is one of the reasons why. I have 4 children and 3 grandchildren, I encourage them to read everything and anything, the adult children now recommend books to me and I keep a store of my children’s and my own books for the grandchildren. Our job is to teach our children to think not what to think.
LikeLike
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were one of my big addictions. And suddenly the occasional references to “gipsies” (e.g. Silver Blaze) make sense. I always emerged from those stories speaking with a British accent, so immersed would I be in that world.
Other books I read avidly included the Wilder Little House books, the Anne of Green Gables books, Trixie Belden, and an incomplete collection I found in my grandmother’s attic of a series called Bomba the Jungle Boy. I suppose it was kind of a Tarzan riff, but set in the Amazonian jungles rather than Africa. It’s frustrating but there are books in that series I was never able to read because I never found them. They were out of print and the books were in tattered condition when I found them. I don’t even know where they are now; they are probably so much dust.
LikeLike
You know, the first – the VERY first Heinlein book I ever read was Glory Road – and I was pretty damned (13) young at the time. Didn’t harm me a bit. Oddly enough, I didn’t really get to appreciate his juveniles until I was an adult. In fact, I didn’t appreciate most juveniles till I was adult. My father had this bookcase, you see… And I read a lot that would have shocked a lot of people. (Including my father if he’d realized I’d been snitching his books…).
I think kids are a bit overprotected nowadays (off topic, I know – but I think it’s on-topic in an odd way – like me, they now have libraries the adults don’t notice.)
LikeLike
I ONLY appreciated YA as an adult too. And fairytales.
LikeLike