Sadly, too often those who seek laudable aims go about their goals in truly ham-fisted ways. So here we are with the on-going disagreements around the translations of Amanda Gorman’s poetry. First it was the withdrawal and removal of the Dutch translator, which kicked off this controversy, and now it is the turn of the Catalan translator.
Amanda Gorman is the African-American poet who spoke at Joe Biden’s January inauguration ceremony with her poem The Hill We Climb. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was chosen to translate Gorman’s poetry into Dutch.
“Incomprehensible” was how the Dutch journalist Janice Deul described the choice of Rijneveld. The problem? Rijneveld is white.
The controversy is not just accusations of racism but that of failure to take into account the implied shared community experience and the inability of anyone outside of this to properly appreciate or understand those experiences.
It is important to point out that Deul, amongst others, did not have an issue strictly just because of the perceived racism in the choice. She even clarified her initial tweets somewhat, telling the BBC that, “I’m not saying a black person can’t translate white work, and vice versa. But not this specific poem of this specific orator in this Black Lives Matter area, that’s the whole issue.”.
Sadly, the “whole issue” does not stop just with Gorman in particular or even racism. Others have gone on to debate that Gorman’s work is not just “normal” poetry, it is a tradition of spoken word oration dealing with rhyme, word play and the phrasing tropes of rap, and in an older sense the cultural traditions of folk African-American culture. To many having those outside of this perceived tradition making use or benefiting from these works smacked of that most over-used, misunderstood and ultimately self-defeating of terms, cultural appropriation. To others it made them look again at the gender bias that exists in many industries and how sexism may manifest itself in translations and, ultimately, whether a man could understand what a woman has written. At all of these the root cause is the claim to cultural exceptionalism, and that subjective experience, paradoxically both individual and as a shared defined community, is of paramount importance and cannot be debated from without.
We should take a pause here to discuss writing generally, poetry and the complexities of translation. It is not just in Gorman’s work where not only the literal words said or on paper but the cadence, phrasing, conjured cultural idiom, rhyming and tone that are of importance, not just to reading the poem but to understanding it and the poet’s intent. This is literally present in every art form or act of self-expression. This then is the challenge of the translator, a truly momentous task. For those who do not speak multiple languages or have not thought about the area it may not seem such. But even in the world outside of poetry, translations can cause massive hilarity and confusion just in the translation of one word or a simple advertising phrase. This is multiplied many-fold when dealing with prose and poetry. Poetry is perhaps the hardest. Time after time will you read a translation and think that that is not exactly correct or that it lacks the same meaning as its original language. If you do read several languages natively sometimes it will just never sound right to you. It has always been of disappointment to me that I will never get to read Dostoevsky in the original Russian, as I don’t intend to learn Russian. Has there been something lost in reading him in another language? Perhaps. That is certainly of debate but that comes down to the skill of the translator. I have read multiple translations of many works, from many languages and certainly have views on who I think captured the work better. We see this, often most markedly, in cinema, where sometimes the best “translation” is the one which does not replicate the original words most accurately but recasts it in order to capture the intent and mood of the original better.
Let’s imagine an example, which is not actually too uncommon. How can we expect to understand the feelings and experiences, let’s say, of a French provincial writer from the 17th Century, if we have today few biographical details of him beyond the most surface of facts. Neither translators nor readers today can possibly know what this writer’s personal experience would have been. Historians could perhaps venture some general suppositions but that would not be that enlightening. Except that is, for that is what the writer has written themselves. Should we though judge writing solely on its own terms? Or is it enhanced by knowledge and understanding of the writer and their life? And this, therefore, is at the crux of the issue with Gorman and translation. The choice of translator, as perhaps a re-writer, or re-imaginator of a work, or just as an unconscious contributor could therefore impart to a work something of themselves and not the original intent, therefore takes upon great import.
This is something perhaps peculiar to translation. However, that is precisely the skill of the translator. When you say a translator cannot translate a particular work, because it comes from this country or that, or because of a lack of shared urban experiences or similar upbringing, what you are really saying is that they are a bad translator and that they cannot help but fail. It is saying that if it has not happened to you, you cannot understand. It is asserting the primacy of subjective experience over learned skill, ability and knowledge. What it is ultimately denying is the power of the human race and the inheritance of the Enlightenment and the ability to learn from others personal experiences.
I cannot judge whether Rijneveld would have been a good translator of Gorman’s work. Or if Victor Obiols would have been good with his translations into Catalan. We should all be able to discuss whether a translator “got it right” but I for one am thankful for how many do their jobs well and allow me enjoy many works I would not otherwise be able to.