Other differences between writers and their translators - such as wealth levels, or political views - were not sparking concern, Mr. 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.īut 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.” “This is not about who can translate, it’s about who gets opportunities to translate,” Deul said in a phone interview. 25 wrote an opinion piece for De Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper, calling Rijneveld’s appointment “incomprehensible.” Jeroen Jumelet/EPA, via ShutterstockĬouching the discussion in such terms was “really ridiculous,” said Janice Deul, a Black Dutch journalist and activist who on Feb. Gorman’s poem to Dutch but later stepped down. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was chosen to translate Ms. 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 was more than their color, she said: “It’s about quality, it’s about the skills you have, and about perspectives.”īut while the German translators managed to negotiate the text, elsewhere in Europe frustration was rising over the matter of who should do the work. Haruna-Oelker added that the team tried hard to find words “which don’t hurt anyone.”Įach member of the team brought different things to the group, said Ms. “You’re constantly moving back and forth between the politics and the composition,” she said. 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. But such accommodations would be “catastrophic” to a poem, Ms. 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.
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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. The team spent a long time discussing how to translate the word “skinny” without conjuring images of an overly thin woman, Ms. 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. “No good translator denies they’re bringing their own experience to a text,” Mr.
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Many translators are also academics or authors themselves.
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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. Only 2 percent of the 362 translators who responded were Black, a spokeswoman for the association said in an email. Last year, the association carried out a diversity survey.
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The real problem underlying the controversy was “the scarcity of Black translators,” it added. “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. Last week, the American Literary Translators Association waded in. “This feels something of a watershed moment,” he added. “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. The discussion has shone a light on the often unexamined world of literary translation and its lack of racial diversity. 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. Literary figures and newspaper columnists across Europe have been arguing for weeks about what these decisions mean, turning Ms.