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The great-grandson of the famous novelist Agatha Christie, manager of her heritage, wishes to change the title of the best seller "Les dix petits nègres".
The ten little niggers is a staple of literature. Agatha Christie has marked the whole world and continues to fascinate with her fascinating investigations through her novels. The ten little niggers is one of the ten best-selling books in history across the world. In October, this staple of literature will appear in a new version where the word "Negro" will be banned. According to RTL, this term appears 74 times in the novel by Agatha Christie, within the original translation dating from 1940. This is why the great-grandson of the famous British novelist, James Prichard, wants the new version to come deletes this term. He thus wishes to rename the title: "When the book was written, the language was different and we used words that are now forgotten." He explains to RTL. The new version that will appear next October will be called They were ten.
Today, manager of the company which owns the literary and media rights to the works of Agatha Christie, James Prichard also explains: "My guess is that Agatha Christie was there primarily to entertain and she wouldn't have liked the idea of someone being hurt by one of her turns of phrase. It makes sense to me: I don't Don't want a headline that distracts from their work. If one person felt that way, it would be too much! We should no longer use terms that could hurt you. "
If France is one of the last countries which still published the original translation with this racist term, the United States, for example, had already changed the title of the work: And Then There Were None. As mentioned above, this goes beyond a simple title change. We had to work on the translation again in order to remove the insulting and discriminatory terms: "For us, it's not just a change of title, it's a whole translation to be revised inside, we had to adapt the content of the book to this change of title" explains Béatrice Duval, for example, who heads the Livre de Poche editions. Thus, the island of the negro in Agatha Christie's novel became the island of the soldier. This title change is reminiscent of the film's temporary withdrawal Gone with the wind on the HBO Max platform. Deemed racist, this film required, according to the executives of HBO Max, a contextualization of its production at the time.