Tradition, translation. What worries in the rewriting of Dahl’s works

Every tradition, and translation, is a betrayal. The word comes from the same root as the verb with which Judas “delivers” Christ to the Pharisees. The past, and the scandalous, never tameable force of its meaning must be tried, scourged, killed and thus, only in this way, resurrected as meaning. There are two ways around this dynamic and its challenges. The first is simply to avoid the trial itself, gag Christ and throw him in the cell, the other is to bleed the words of the accused, and make him declare what we already want to hear.

It is these violations of tradition that emerge, today and not only today, in many voices and policies of reactionary-conservative thought and in those of a certain progressive mentality. The debate on the rewriting of Roald Dahl’s works, changing words and adjectives on categories of people or physical characteristics, altering the books read by the protagonists, is only the latest epiphenomenon of two different and converging tractions. The clearest warning on the specific issue was perhaps expressed by Nicholas Lagioia: “If they can reprint a text, with your signature, changing your words, it means that I’m making you say what you didn’t say”.

As usual, a little historical perspective shows how this all goes back in time. Conservative ideology, with its supposed reverence for traditional culture, has always tended to get anything that contradicted or challenged it to be censored, removed. In Forster’s Maurice’s Oxford one obviously reads Plato, bypassing all the passages on pederasty: “They both followed the translation course held by the principal, and while a student proceeded calmly in reading a text, Mr. Cornwallis ordered in a sharp but colorless voice : ‘Omit it: it is a reference to the unmentionable vice of the Greeks’”.

In Orwell’s dystopian dictatorship words are reduced, altered, in order to obtain the most radical and intimate of auto da fe, the one in which the prisoner rewrites his own past and embraces the categories imposed by power and its newspeak: “We cannot to tolerate that a wrong thought exists anywhere in the world, however harmless and recondite it may be. The commandment of former despotisms was: ‘Thou shalt not!’. The commandment of the totalitarians was: ‘You must!’. Ours is: ‘You are!’” The past is hidden, or it is altered. A stereotyped, filtered, invented tradition is proposed (many Western scholars rarely know Greek and the most philologically correct answer to the right-wing protesters who presented themselves in front of a high school in Rome with the banner “We wild males, you hysterical queers” the high school students themselves provided it: “Try saying hysterical queer to Achille Pelide”) or, in the name of an alleged defense of more just and changed sensibilities, the right is claimed not to expand the spectrum of possible narratives, but to modify the already existing ones.

Both of these positions are based on the same contempt for freedom, individual and collective, for the ability to be challenged by what precedes us, from its “separate and self-sufficient existence” (Calasso), and thus elaborate our posture in the world. As Christopher Hitchens warned, “Be even more suspicious than I’ve told you of anyone who uses the terms we or there without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription. Authoritarian populists try to make you accept it; very often it is an attempt to smuggle in tribalism.”

A pressure amplified by the new frontiers of the global market, which it courts with the boundless strength of its consensus, as Loredana Lipperini underlined: “When we like it, unwillingly or indifferently, we delegate the defense of rights and minorities of any kind to an economic power, to marketing, to our transformation into a brand – whether it’s the parents who buy Roald Dahl clean for their children or the influencer activist on Instagram – we are no longer free and inclusive, but more submissive”. Nothing new under the sun once again. “There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes body and soul. The first is called prince. The second is called pope. The third is called the people”. Words by Oscar Wilde, who knew a lot about old and new processes and moralisms.