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Last month, on one of my children’s literature lists, the writer Philip Pullman posted a note, wondering what list members thought of age banding. Age banding is when publishers place an age recommendation/restriction on the book, much like what generally occurs with films.
I believe everyone who responded on the list (including me) was against age banding. Naturally, publishers may find that it boosts sales and is also a way of protecting themselves against parents or teachers who complain about (or who even threaten to sue over) books that they feel are not age-appropriate for their children or students. However, there are many reasons against this.
Mr. Pullman and a group of other writers, including David Almond, Aidan Chambers, Terry Pratchett, Helen Dunmore, and Melvin Burgess, then decided to write an explanation of why they are against this. Their letter has now been published in the Bookseller. In addition, they have started a website that serves both to express their view on this subject and also to collect signatures of those who agree with them about it.
Their sensible reasons include:
“Each child is unique, and so is each book. Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless.
Children easily feel stigmatized, and many will put aside books they might love because of the fear of being called babyish. Other children will feel dismayed that books of their ‘correct’ age-group are too challenging, and will be put off reading even more firmly than before.
Age-banding seeks to help adults choose books for children, and we're all in favour of that; but it does so by giving them the wrong information. It’s also likely to encourage over-prescriptive or anxious adults to limit a child's reading in ways that are unnecessary and even damaging.
Everything about a book is already rich with clues about the sort of reader it hopes to find – jacket design, typography, cover copy, prose style, illustrations. These are genuine connections with potential readers, because they appeal to individual preference. An age-guidance figure is a false one, because it implies that all children of that age are the same.
Children are now taught to look closely at book covers for all the information they convey. The hope that they will not notice the age-guidance figure, or think it unimportant, is unfounded.
Writers take great care not to limit their readership unnecessarily. To tell a story as well and inclusively as possible, and then find someone at the door turning readers away, is contrary to everything we value about books, and reading, and literature itself.”
Recently, I noticed this article about literature in Iran, especially that in translation. It is interesting to see how much censorship plays a role (presumably native literature is pre-censored). As described in the article, “The ministry checks manuscripts mainly for erotic and religious transgression. Today, if a novel has made it past the censors, most Iranians assume that it has been tampered with and that they are better off searching for the Shah-era edition or the bootleg film version. Even in fiction, all relationships must conform to Islamic law. In the most recent vetted edition of “Madame Bovary,” for example, Emma’s adultery is omitted. Characters in Western novels who drink Champagne or whiskey find themselves uniformly sipping doogh, an Iranian yogurt soda that has never made anyone tipsy.”
Personally, I think one of the great joys of reading literature is learning about other cultures and lifestyles. For example, I’d find it odd if the characters in a book that takes place in Iran were drinking Guinness or enjoying a Japanese tea ceremony, and not doogh. When books are censored and adapted in this way, it seems as though only the plot (or some portion of it) matters, and not the culture behind it, and that is a loss. Apparently, many Iranians are aware of this and that’s why they turn to bootleg movies instead.
In Iran, rather than deal with these issues, “some [publishers] have turned away from contemporary literature altogether. The Western fascination with Rumi, for example, has heightened the already enthusiastic interest in Iran, and publishers are putting out new criticism and fresh translations. “The Persian classics create fewer problems,” Mohammad-Reza Zolfaghari, an editor at the Chaveh publishing house, said.”It’s obviously, and unfortunately, much easier to control new translations of appropriate classics than attempt to translate foreign texts (or movies) that might be challenging to the country’s (or the government’s) belief system.
In the last post, I quoted from Dr. Marjorie Garber’s book Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, in which she mentioned some translatorial/editorial changing/censorship (or “gender bowdlerization”) of work featuring homosexuals and bisexuals. Unfortunately, this is not a unique or altogether rare phenomenon.
In the special Translating Humour issue of The Translator magazine from 2002, in an article entitled “Francoist Translation Censorship of Two Billy Wilder Films,” Jeroen Vandaele writes about how, during Franco’s regime, translatorial censorship took place of work that was considered inappropriate or immoral. For example, Some Like it Hot might be considered amoral because of issues relating to its portrayal of cross-dressing, the potential gay implications of the movie, and other sexual topics (especially, it might be noted, sexual issues that are outside the realm of what is accepted as “normal”). Dr. Vandaele says that some of the sexual humor in Some Like it Hot and The Apartment was “changed or deleted because of immorality” or “replaced by morality,” and one can assume that if this sort of censorship happened to films, it was part of a general view of culture and society that also affected literature.
Whether for political or other reasons, translators and editors (and other people with power, such as teachers) sometimes censor or change material that they consider improper or otherwise unsuitable. I remember someone who grew up in Iran telling me about seeing foreign films in Iran and then, once she had moved to Europe and later to America, seeing the same movies and being surprised at how much longer they were; in other words, “inappropriate” material had been deleted or changed before the films were deemed acceptable in Iran.
Personally, I’m a strong believer in having as little as possible come between the audience and the text (or film or whatever) as the author (or director or whoever) envisioned it, and I hope that we translators will be cautious about (ab)using the power the wield.
