The Secret Garden

I remem­ber read­ing this book to my kids when they were at just the age to take in the mag­ic of all that hap­pens in the secret gar­den, and what I remem­ber about read­ing it aloud was that I “trans­lat­ed” the York­shire dialect, which I could not pro­nounce with­out it being a ter­rif­ic dis­trac­tion, into my plain Amer­i­can Eng­lish. I could “hear” it myself in my head, but I couldn’t repro­duce it. Occa­sion­al­ly I’d stop and try to deliv­er a line, but it was to everyone’s relief when I just went back to “trans­lat­ing” as we read. I don’t think it hurt the sto­ry — there’s lots of talk about the York­shire way of talk­ing, and we read all that.

We read it all. Includ­ing the racist ele­ments. Of which there are rather a lot. Mary Lennox’s atti­tude toward and lan­guage regard­ing the “natives,” “blacks,” and “dark­ies,” in India, where her sto­ry begins, is rep­re­hen­si­ble. I remem­ber stum­bling when I read them out loud. I’d stop and we’d talk about how that way of talk­ing about peo­ple was so ugly and wrong…but wasn’t known to be at the time … which was ter­ri­ble, too. I’d wrap up the dis­cus­sion para­phras­ing Maya Angelou with a “when we know bet­ter, we must do bet­ter” max­im. Which I believe in whole­heart­ed­ly. Espe­cial­ly when it is hard to do.

Now that books are being banned and “revised” for lan­guage used before we “knew bet­ter,” I find myself think­ing about this a lot. (See “As Clas­sic Nov­els Get Revised for Today’s Read­ers, a Debate About Where To Draw The Line” in the New York Times). I read a lot of books from my child­hood to my kids — all my beloved vol­umes. Many, if not most, have lan­guage in them I didn’t want my kids to use or think in. But I can’t think of a time (which doesn’t mean there wasn’t, of course) when I changed the words of the author — except when a dialect not my own would’ve been mocked by me read­ing it, as in The Secret Gar­den. I won­der how dif­fer­ent my chang­ing the dialect is from chang­ing dat­ed and offen­sive language…?

I don’t have an answer to these things … Some of our clas­sics have not aged well in spots or in their entire­ty. Fig­ur­ing out how best to address that is fraught on many lev­els. But I do know this: I trea­sure the dis­cus­sions I had with my kids over books as much, if not more, than the actu­al read­ing of the books. Even when the dis­cus­sions are uncom­fort­able, I’m glad to have had a con­tex­tu­al rea­son to have them.