More than 600 letters from the British author to his mother written over four decades make up “He loves you, Boy”: an intimate story about his childhood in various boarding schools and his years as a pilot and fighter during the Second World War
If there’s anyone who can be thrown on the scaffold for bewitching children, it’s him Roald Dahl. The spell in question: Give them to drink (and drink it yourself), an anti-allergy elixir for any kind of censorship. His irony and impudence have made him the most widely read and best-selling author of children’s literature. Who else could tempt Walt Disney, Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Anderson or Danny DeVito, all great filmmakers drawn to the spirit of their creations?
Despite his undeniable talent, Dahl discovered his passion for writing late in life. He had already passed the age of 40 when he dared to write his first book for children; He had never thought of becoming a writer before. He attributed this sudden change to that a “monumental blow to the head” which he received as a war pilot in 1940. The accident that occurred in the Libyan desert not only gave him material to write about, but also changed his personality due to the mental consequences and triggered his desire to write.
Although Dahl showed little interest in the profession until 1942, he practiced his literary art from childhood through the extraordinary letters he wrote to his mother. Sophie Magdalena. More than 600 letters from four decades of experience, which the Gatopardo publishing house has now published in a volume entitled “ Loves you, boy.
The book balances the biographical narrative with the epistolary genre, ranging from children’s anecdotes to historiographical portraits, without forgetting the humor. This is the first translation of All the best from the boyoriginally published in the UK in 2016 to mark the 100th anniversary of Dahl’s birth.
“I was very interested in it being readable in Spanish, I wanted the origin of his work to be better known. It complements very well the stories about his life that make up Boy and Volando Solo,” he says. Mariana Sandez, prologue author of You Love You, Boy, who translated and contributed to the translation of the texts that contextualize the letters. “Whether you want to delve into Dahl’s work or delve deeper into it, I think readers will be as fascinated as I was.”
Explain Donald Sturrock, editor of the book, that these private writings “are the first evidence that his literary imagination is at work.” In other words, in the texts one can recognize characteristic elements of Roald Dahl’s pen, which lie between his crooked lines and his irregular ones handwriting emerge. “It tells of the amusing eccentricities of adults as well as the absurd habits of their school teachers,” says Sturrock, author of the biography “Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl.” “He also plays a lot with language. The letters are more entertaining than informational and are often full of comical details,” says Sturrock.
All of these letters, which Sofie Magdalene kept in a locked chest until her death in 1965, describe Dahl’s school life in the 1920s and 1930s: his time in Tanganyika before the war, his training as a pilot and his combat experiences. They also show his time as a diplomat in Washington or his work with the British secret service in New York and describe in detail his beginnings as a writer.
Although they provide an intimate insight into the relationship between mother and son, Magdalene’s personality remains in the shadows as her part of the correspondence has been completely lost. “I was surprised that Roald didn’t keep any of the letters his mother sent him.”, admits Sturrock. “When I was researching the book, I really wanted to find at least one of them. But I failed: the only letter from Sofie Magdalene that I discovered was addressed to one of Roald’s nieces.”
These texts are the first evidence that his literary imagination was at work.
Donald Sturrock, author of the biography “Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl”
The correspondence reveals, among other things, the deep connection between a widowed mother and her only son. It reveals Dahl’s need to share all the more or less relevant details of his life, despite the miles of distance that separated them. “It is touching how he shares with his mother many mischief and pranks that a child would normally hide from his parents to avoid punishment.”Sandez says. “The level of confidence they had is obvious.”
It is also known that Sofie Magdalene was a source of inspiration for Dahl’s stories and imaginary worlds, stimulating his imaginative personality even when he was barely a foot above the ground. Many experts claim that his Norwegian family heritage was mixed with the rich Celtic mythology of his adopted hometown of Cardiff. The relationship of mutual support and affection becomes clear in works in which the mother figure plays a central role, such as: fly alonewhere a wounded pilot feels his mother’s comforting presence in the middle of battle The witcheswhere the grandmother takes care of the grandson after the parents die.
How can we explain such a close bond that sometimes borders on the obsessive, even Oedipesque? Donald Sturrock points out in Dahl’s biography, published in 2010, that the concept of “home” was complicated for him due to his Norwegian origins and the fact that he had spent his childhood in various boarding schools in England. “Dear mother, the director of the boarding school scares me”, he admits in one of the letters. He often felt like a Norwegian-Welsh emigrant, confined to schools that he described in his memoirs as prisons.
In Boy: Tales of Childhood he tells of his arrival on the first, across the Bristol Channel, when he was only nine years old: “The first night of helplessness and sadness in St. Peter’s, when I found myself in the Bed rolled up and the lights went out.” The lights went out, I couldn’t think about anything other than my house, my mother and my sisters. I didn’t want to sleep with my back to them.
These traumas and torments influenced his work: the characters are mostly orphans or belong to single parents, have severe economic difficulties or have to put up with neglectful parents. “I think the way Roald got through the unhappy days at boarding school with a positive attitude and a sense of humor is important.”says Sturrock. “It is a powerful reminder of how childhood trauma can be overcome with laughter and objectivity. Roald never wrote to his mother from school as an unfortunate victim, but always as someone who wanted to entertain her with funny observations or bizarre, imaginative anecdotes. I hope that the book inspires today’s youth to write entertaining letters. I think they were a kind of therapy for him.
Helplessness is a recurring theme in his novels: Dahl grants these children magical powers or the help of adults, as in Miss Honey MatildaWilly Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factorygrandmother in The witchesand the queen in The big, good-natured giant. “After suffering so much in his childhood from the punishments he suffered in English boarding schools, he became a defender of children,” says Sández. “It is the leitmotif of his work: it is difficult for him to be seen as a truly cruel person when he was so sensitive towards defenseless beings such as children or animals.”
After suffering so much from the punishments he endured in English boarding schools, he became an advocate for children.
Mariana Sández, prologue author of “He Loves You, Boy”
Through the letters, telegrams, notes and photographs that make up Love You, Boy, the reader gets a glimpse into the never-ending adventures of Roald Dahl and even hears his unique voice full of honesty, humor and camaraderie as he narrates each ticket. In an exercise in authorized invasion of intimacy, fans witness the process by which the British narrator becomes one of the world’s most successful writers.
And also one of the most controversial. Like his compatriots Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton or JK Rowlingthe author was the subject of one Cancel culture veiled due to the allegations of anti-Semitism, racism and machismo made against his character. “The media called him authoritarian or violent when he divorced his first wife,” admits Sández. “In the letters you can see that he is a very uninhibited man, there are slip-ups in which he says things that today would be considered extremely wrong. But we cannot be cynical; They are comments that we would all miss in our closest circles.” “
In fact, this lack of inhibition is one of the keys to Roald Dahl. “The freedom to express what we all think, without any self-censorship, has brought him as many literary advantages as personal disadvantages,” says Sández. “It knows no boundaries and doesn’t pretend to have them.. “This contrast or unexpected collision causes laughter: it combines the taboo and the ominous, the uncanny with the comic, and transforms it into something as grotesque as it is attractive.”
This disrespectful desire means paying a price in the 21st century: being condemned to social failure at least once. A few months ago, her writings came under the knife of political correctness for using seemingly offensive language – “fat”, “monstrous”, “idiotic” and substitutes – in some of her most popular titles, such as “Matilda” or “Matilda”. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory used inappropriate language.
Let’s go back to February of this year: the British publisher Puffin, backed by the heirs of Roald Dahl, announced its intention to rewrite these mythical stories by reducing the acidity so that there would be more women and more black characters in the landscape . So that children wouldn’t cruelly mock their peers and Matilda would read Jane Austen instead of infamous authors like Kipling in her lonely afternoons.
“Now it would be frowned upon to speak disparagingly about a person’s physique,” says Sández. “It is true that his lyrics are full of outbursts and intelligent jokes that some might find offensive. His style is generally incorrect and provocative, but that is exactly what has made him successful.”
In fact, readers, young and old, screamed. No one outside the Roald Dahl Story Company – the foundation responsible for managing the rights to his work – understood this irrational decision. It was then that Puffin had to turn backby surrendering to the evidence that the whitewashed editions of the books would have very limited, if not no, reach.
His style is incorrect and provocative, but that’s exactly what made him successful.
Mariana Sández, prologue author of “He Loves You, Boy”
For this reason, in the translation of Te Quiero, Boy, with the intention of preserving as much as possible the essence of Dahl’s texts, tried to respect some original errors that, according to Sández, are funny: “For example, that the young Dahl “When he first encountered the English writer, he wrote Dickins instead of Dickens. On the other hand, there are some tolerable or expressive puns, redundancies or inconsistencies in the original language that are inevitably lost or blurred in translation.”
In a message to children in 1984, shortly before the publication of Boy, the author spoke about letters from his childhood and the fact that some of them would appear in his new book. “They are so poorly written and have so many spelling mistakes that they make you laugh.” he told his readers.
“Roald’s poor spelling continued throughout his life,” says Sturrock. “The same goes for his incorrect use of the apostrophe. After hours of carefully transcribing these errors, I decided to correct them. At least in the letters he wrote as an adult.”
Thanks to books like He loves you, Boy and the successive special editions of his books, Roald Dahl’s legacy lives on and his prose is cemented as a cross-generational phenomenon. It is read by parents to children and by children to parents, it is read in classrooms and at home, it is read with laughter and tears.
Sández underlines his validity in a time of fickle taste: “Unlike other authors who lose relevance in the narrative, he remains interesting in two ways because It is attractive to teenagers and adults. Try as some might, not only has it not aged, it seems ever more contemporary. “The Automatic Grammatizer” is a story that anticipates ChatGPT, while “The Sound Machine” predicts current experiments in plant eavesdropping.
Love, Boy: A Life in Letters, Drawings and Photographs, by Roald Dahl (Cattopardo) is now on sale. You can buy it here.
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