Amanda Gorman’s Poetry United Critics. It’s
Dividing Translators.
Should a white writer translate a Black poet’s work? A
debate in Europe has exposed the lack of diversity in the world of literary
translation.
By Alex
Marshall
Published
March 26, 2021
Updated
March 28, 2021, 7:48 p.m.
LONDON —
Hadija Haruna-Oelker, a Black journalist, has just produced the German
translation of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb,” the poem about a “skinny
Black girl” that for many people was the highlight of President Biden’s
inauguration.
So has
Kubra Gumusay, a German writer of Turkish descent.
As has Uda
Strätling, a translator, who is white.
Literary
translation is usually a solitary pursuit, but the poem’s German publisher went
for a team of writers to ensure the poem
— just 710 words — wasn’t just true to Gorman’s voice. The three
were also asked to make its political
and social significance clear, and to avoid anything that might exclude people
of color, people with disabilities, women, or other marginalized groups.
For nearly
two weeks, the team debated word choices, occasionally emailing Ms. Gorman for
clarifications. But as they worked, an argument was brewing elsewhere in Europe
about who has the right to translate the poet’s work — an international
conversation about identity, language and diversity in a proud but often
overlooked segment of the literary world.
“This whole
debate started,” Gumusay said, with a sigh.
It began in
February when Meulenhoff, a publisher in the Netherlands, said it had asked
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, a writer whose debut novel won last year’s Booker
International Prize, to translate Gorman’s poem into Dutch.
Rijneveld,
who uses the pronouns they and them, was the “ideal candidate,” Meulenhoff said
in a statement. But many social media users disagreed, asking why a white
writer had been chosen when Gorman’s reading at the inauguration had been a
significant cultural moment for Black people.
Three days
later, Rijneveld quit.
Then, the
poem’s Catalan publisher dropped Victor Obiols, a white translator, who said in
a phone interview his publisher told him his profile “was not suitable for the
project.”
Literary
figures and newspaper columnists across Europe have been arguing for weeks about
what these decisions mean, turning Ms. Gorman’s poem of hope for “a nation that
isn’t broken, but simply unfinished” into the latest focus of debates about
identity politics across the continent. The discussion has shone a light on the
often unexamined world of literary translation and its lack of racial
diversity.
“I can’t
recall a translation controversy ever taking the world by storm like this,”
Aaron Robertson, a Black Italian-to-English translator, said in a phone
interview.
“This feels
something of a watershed moment,” he added.
Last week,
the American Literary Translators Association waded in. “The question of
whether identity should be the deciding factor in who is allowed to translate
whom is a false framing of the issues at play,” it said in a statement
published on its website.
The real
problem underlying the controversy was “the scarcity of Black translators,” it
added. Last year, the association carried out a diversity survey. Only 2
percent of the 362 translators who responded were Black, a spokeswoman for the
association said in an email.
Translation
is a job for the passionate, given it is work that comes with limited
recognition (translators’ names often don’t appear on book jackets) and is hard
to do full time. Many translators are also academics or authors themselves.
A
translator’s main task is to capture the nuance and feeling of a language in a
way that you could never achieve with Google Translate, and most translators
have long happily wrestled with questions of how to faithfully translate works
when they are about people completely unlike them.
“No good
translator denies they’re bring their own experience to a text,” Mr. Robertson
said.
In a video
interview, the members of the German team said they had certainly done such
wrestling to make sure their translation of the text — about a weary country
whose “people diverse and beautiful will emerge,” — was faithful to Ms.
Gorman’s spirit.
The team
spent a long time discussing how to translate the word “skinny” without
conjuring images of an overly thin woman, Ms. Gumusay said. They also debated
how to bring a sense of the poem’s gender-inclusive language into German, in
which many objects — and all people — are either masculine or feminine. A
common practice in Germany to signify gender neutrality involves inserting an
asterisk in the middle of a word then using its feminine plural form. But such
accommodations would be “catastrophic” to a poem, Ms. Strätling said, as it
“destroys your metric rhythm.” They had to change one sentence where Gorman
spoke of “successors” to avoid using it, she added.
“You’re
constantly moving back and forth between the politics and the composition,” she
said.
“To me it
felt like dancing,” Ms. Gumusay said of the process. Ms. Haruna-Oelker added
that the team tried hard to find words “which don’t hurt anyone.”
Each member
of the team brought different things to the group, said Ms. Haruna-Oelker, the
Black journalist. It was more than their color, she said: “It’s about quality,
it’s about the skills you have, and about perspectives.”
But while
the German translators managed to negotiate the text, elsewhere in Europe
frustration was rising over the matter of who should do the work.
Nuria
Barrios, the translator of the poem’s Spanish edition, who is white, wrote in
the newspaper El País that Rijneveld’s stepping down from the project was “a
catastrophe.” (Rijneveld declined an interview request for this article.)
“It is the
victory of identity politics over creative freedom,” she wrote, adding: “To
remove imagination from translation is to subject the craft to a lobotomy.”
Ms. Barrios
wrote that she did not want a world where “only whites can translate whites,
only women can translate women, only trans people can translate trans people,”
she added.
Couching
the discussion in such terms was “really ridiculous,” said Janice Deul, a Black
Dutch journalist and activist who on Feb. 25 wrote an opinion piece for De
Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper, calling Rijneveld’s appointment
“incomprehensible.”
“This is
not about who can translate, it’s about who gets opportunities to translate,”
Deul said in a phone interview. She listed 10 Black Dutch spoken-word artists
who could have done the job in her article but said all of them had been
overlooked.
But John
McWhorter, a linguist and professor of English at Columbia University who has
written critically of identity politics, said in an email that “there is a
tacit idea that we are supposed to be especially concerned about the
‘appropriateness’ of a translator’s identity in the particular case of
blackness.”
Other
differences between writers and their translators — such as wealth levels, or
political views — were not sparking concern, Mr. McWhorter, who is Black,
added. “Instead, our sense of ‘diversity’ is narrower than that word implies:
It’s only about skin color,” he said.
The one
opinion missing in all of this is, of course, Ms. Gorman’s. Viking is releasing “The Hill We Climb” in
the United States on Tuesday, but Ms. Gorman’s spokeswoman has not so far
responded to requests for comment.
Whether Ms.
Gorman weighed in on the translator choices is not clear. But either she or her
agent, Writers House, which represents the translation rights, apparently has
the authority to do so.
Aylin
LaMorey-Salzmann, the editor of the German edition for publisher Hoffmann und
Campe, said in a phone interview that the rights owner had to agree to the
choice, which had to be someone of similar profile to Ms. Gorman.
Univers,
the Catalan publisher who dropped Mr. Obiols, said in a statement it had chosen
him “without the knowledge or approval of the agents and the poet.” It declined
to answer further questions.
Irene
Christopoulou, an editor at Psichogios, the poem’s Greek publisher, was still
waiting for approval for its choice of translator. The translator was a white
“emerging female poet,” Ms. Christopoulou said in an email. “Due to the racial
profile of the Greek population, there are no translators/poets of color to
choose from,” she added.
A
spokeswoman for Tammi, the poem’s Finnish publisher, said in an email that “The
negotiations are still going on with the agent and Amanda Gorman herself.”
Several
other European publishers named Black musicians as their translators. Timbuktu,
a rapper, has completed a Swedish version, and Marie-Pierra Kakoma, a singer better
known as Lous and the Yakuza, has translated the French edition, which will be
published by Editions Fayard in May.
“I thought
Lous’s writing skills, her sense of rhythm, her connection with spoken poetry
would be tremendous assets,” Sophie de Closets, a publisher at Fayard, said in
an email explaining why she chose a pop star.
Issues of
identity “should definitely be considered” when hiring translators, Ms. de
Closets added, but that went beyond race. “It is the publisher’s responsibility
to look for the ideal combination between one given work and the person who
will translate it,” she said.
Ms.
Haruna-Oelker, one of the German translators, said one disappointing outcome of
the debate in Europe was that it had diverted attention from the message of
Gorman’s poem. “The Hill We Climb” spoke about bringing people together, Ms.
Haruna-Oelker said, just as the German publisher had done by assembling a team.
“We’ve
tried a beautiful experiment here, and this is where the future lies,” Ms.
Gumusay said. “The future lies in trying to find new forms of collaboration,
trying to bring together more voices, more sets of eyes, more perspectives to
create something new.”
An earlier
version of this article misstated the relationship of the Writers House agency
to the translation rights for Amanda Gorman's poem. It represents those rights;
it does not own them.
Alex
Marshall is a European culture reporter, based in London. @alexmarshall81
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