Whoops, we’ve been here just six days in 2011 and there’s already a controversy brewing in the literary circles.
Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn set in the mid 1800s in America, is about to get a new set of words to replace a few original ones that the author used in his work. The debate is centered around the ‘N'(‘n____r’) word – strong, hurtful, and of course highly discriminatory and derogatory – which the author has used liberally in his original text. A new version of the book is all set to replace it with a more acceptable and sober ‘slave’, which may create less turmoil in the reader’s mind.
As usual, we have people saying ‘aye’ and ‘nay’ to the move. But what we are really thinking is this: it’s one thing to ensure that current examples of speech and text are free from such words, but to change something that was written more than a hundred years ago… that too from a piece that reflected the then-contemporary society…
Frenzied groups have often asked governments to ban books which (seemingly) contain inflammatory or derogatory material. Thankfully, they are reactions to books that are newly printed or have been brought to the limelight. Now, looks like there could be edits retrospectively (and also to classics). A right only an author or creator of the work should enjoy, don’t you think?
