Agatha Christie's French translations will undergo "revisions", including the removal of terms deemed offensive on the physique or origin of characters, "thus aligning with other international editions", said a door. -speech of Éditions du Masque to Agence France-Presse on Monday.
"The French translations of Agatha Christie's work are subject to the usual revisions and over the years incorporate the corrections requested by Agatha Christie Limited (the company that manages the author's work, editor's note), if thus aligning with other international editions, "says the publisher, which is part of the Hachette group.
At the end of March, the British daily The Telegraph reported that several passages from the novels recounting the investigations of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, originally published between 1920 and 1976, had been rewritten after review by a peer review committee. In particular, the publisher has modified or removed descriptions of certain foreign characters. As in Death on the Nile (1937), where the character of Mrs Allerton complained about a group of children and laughed at their noses, or in The Mysterious Affair of Styles (1920), in which Hercule Poirot pointed out that another character was "a Jew, of course".
This isn't the first time an Agatha Christie title has been changed. In 2020, the detective novel Les Dix Petits Nègres, one of the most widely read and sold in the world, had been renamed "They were ten" and the pejorative name, cited 74 times in the original version, had been removed from the new edition.
Recently, changes to English author Roald Dahl's children's novels sparked outrage in the UK. References to weight, mental health, violence, or racial issues had been redacted from works like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach.
Faced with the outcry, its publisher, Puffin UK, had assured that it would continue to publish the original versions in a special collection. The author's French publishing house, Gallimard Jeunesse, had indicated that it would continue to publish the original versions. The adventures of the famous British spy James Bond, written by Ian Fleming, have also been rewritten in English to remove certain passages deemed racist.
