Changing lanes
Only one day after accepting the role of translating Amanda Gorman's poem The Hill We Climb into Dutch, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has stepped down over an outcry that they're not black. This is despite the fact that Gorman chose Rijneveld herself.
Critics said it was not just about skin colour but identity too. This was not simply about translation but whether Gorman's poetry could be accurately reflected, interpreted by someone of a different ethnicity, genre, and mother tongue.
Anna Holligan, BBC News
So, the critics want a mother tongue English speaker to translate the work into Dutch? Good luck with that. Many Dutch speak excellent, if not flawless, English; finding a native English speaker that can match them, especially poetically, is going to be an interesting proposition. Presumably, they will also have to be a black woman, preferably American. At least the candidate shortlist will be…short!
The poem's translation into Catalan has met a similar fate. After Victor Obiols had completed the work, the publisher received a request from Viking Books for the work to be carried out by a female activist with African-American origins, if possible.
As he himself observes:
"They did not question my abilities," Víctor Obiols told the AFP news agency, noting that the publisher had promised to pay him for his work. "But if I cannot translate a poet because she is a woman, young, black, an American of the 21st Century, neither can I translate Homer because I am not a Greek of the eighth century BC. Or could not have translated Shakespeare because I am not a 16th-Century Englishman," he added.
Honestly, it's pretty deplorable. Everyone's expected (by whom?) to stay in their lane…unless they're deemed worthy (by whom?) of not abiding to the strictures applied to the rest of us—a black Anne Boleyn or black female 007, for example.
Do people really have nothing more productive to do with their time than worry about the sociopolitical identity of an artist, rather than the quality of their work? These are the piddling concerns of the self-appointed, conceited, and triggered
virtue signallers. Incapable of achieving anything of note themselves, they externalise their own inadequacies by hectoring others. It's really quite pathetic.
Still, it's only a poem. And the world turns.