[hildea]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

My guess is that the kind of people who read P. G. Wodehouse will dislike these changes, with bowdlerization advocated internally by PRH employees pushing their vision of a future-oriented society.

Is there anyone here who is going to buy a Wodehouse book because it's new and improved? Didn't think so. Is there anyone who, on rare occasion, reads Wodehouse, and will avoid the improved version? At least one -- me.

I read a lot of Wodehouse as a teenager, and was curious enough about this to look for specific changes. The Times wrote:

Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is in the 1934 novel Right Ho, Jeeves, in which a racial term used to describe a “minstrel of the old school” has been removed.

That one's at Gutenberg, so I could find the specific quote:

Originally Posted by "Right Ho, Jeeves" by P.G.Wodehouse

When I was able to see clearly once more, I perceived that Gussie was now seated. He had his hands on his knees, with his elbows out at right angles, like a n----- minstrel of the old school about to ask Mr. Bones why a chicken crosses the road, and he was staring before him with a smile so fixed and pebble-beached that I should have thought that anybody could have guessed that there sat one in whom the old familiar juice was plashing up against the back of the front teeth.

(except in the original, n- is spelled out.) I've been thinking about rereading some Wodehouse, and I while I love how he plays around with language (why write "drunk" when you can write "one in whom the old familiar juice was plashing up against the back of the front teeth" ) I really don't think his use of n- makes that paragraph better. (Is "plashing" a typo for "splashing", by the way, or is that a real word?)


Thinking about it, I've read a lot of Wodehouse and Christie, but almost none of it in the author's original words. I read them as a young teenager, when I was mostly reading in Norwegian, and mostly getting my books from the library, which had much, much more books in Norwegian than in other languages.

I looked up some of the translated Wodehouses now, and the differences are interesting. For instance, in Norwegian we have both formal and informal versions of "you", just like in German, but these days, the formal version is almost never used. In translations from 1940s, Bertie and Jeeves both use the formal version to each other. In translations from 1980s, Jeeves uses the formal version to his employer, and Bertie uses the informal version to his employee. Not a big deal, of course, but just one of many ways that translators must decide how to retell the author's story.