I could say the same of you, who seem to care more for not being taken for the wrong sort of person than for getting my point. You are saying there the same you said before, and which was what I opposed, and that doesn't mean I think you are a bad person siding with censors and all that.
I said that abridged versions are about as new as translation, so it's not such a brilliant discovery and new solution, not even a new application of an old solution: my care was to show that talking about "an abridged version" is a way of confusing people, kids even more so, by giving the impression that you are being given the same, or the "essence" or "most important part" which is but a different way of saying exactly the same thing, by reading that version. My point was not against teaching kids the stories of books, but against not making it clear that what they are given is not the novel. It is naive to believe that point is a mere trifle, because if you say that abridged versions deleting and reformulating whole pages and chapters ARE Twain's novel, how can it not be that Twain's novel remains so with just the substitution of all occurrences of a single term?
In short, kids should also be taught, VERY CLEARLY AND SPECIFICALLY, that they are not being taught Twain in abridged versions. And don't anybody be so naive as to say that everybody that an abridged version is not obviously the same, because I will have to repeat yet another time that even those who pretend they are aware of that, will still claim that there is still some gist or essence which is being transmitted to kids, and that that gist and essence can do without the impact of the term here under discussion, which is part and a very relevant one (proof the discussions here and elsewhere) of Twain's work.
A concoction based on Twain's novel can illustrate a concocted lesson about racism, but using that concoction as Twain's lesson itself is a different thing, and it ignores and destroys all the care, the complexity and the force that distinguish what we can call an American classic with a lesson about racism.
If anything, if it really is basically about teaching the lessons to be learned from the novel, why not just do what is always done at schools too, apart from abridging or translating, which is giving to kids whole unabridged passages considered especially relevant, and the rest as a summary, which is in fact an abridgment of an abridgment (of an abridgment if you want), instead of giving them a watered down version under the impression that it IS Twain's novel, or more his novel than just a commentary on it using his own words and passages here and there?
And yes, what I say obviously implies that if you haven't read Flaubert's or Racine's, or Du Fu, or Cervantes' or Pushkin's originals you are not reading the real work, and that's how you explain that British and American scholars find it impossible to understand why some of those authors are so highly praised in their native cultures.
Languages and communication and texts are a fascinating... and maddening world... hence belamy
