Friday 2 March 2012

Last on Gulliver's Travels

I haven't been able to the give a "good rereading" to Gulliver's Travels but a lot of the words have gone through my eyes and I have jumped around quite a bit in pursuit of my worries about what I have recently heard. The BBC have played merry hell with it.
One scene in particular had bothered me. When Gulliver is sexually attacked by a female Yahoo, he responds. That's not in the book. Not at all.
I think now that it is no longer available to listen to; so this is just by way of tidying up my own thread.
It's hardly useful to worry away at everything now; I just note I am disappointed that they did so much violence to the text. The narrative seemed to have been chopped up and pulled from a bag, Cabaret Voltaire-style, in pursuit of a shortened story.
Some of it seemed pointless -- like the radio versions of French novels where people speak, in English, with peculiar French akSENTS to other French people. (John Keats gets a Kings English voice of course)
Why dramatise it? It's not a dramatic book. It needs a straight reading. Now that would be something.
I could say that to the BBC; but they write back saying they're right.

No comments: