[Mark McDonnell]

Hey Julie,

I have a few issues with your take on this. I hope to get them all out then move on.

Do people really think that Janice Deul has no right to express an opinion about the translation of this particular poem?

I don't want to labour this point, but in her original article, where she had time and space to clearly state her position, Deul doesn’t specify that she is talking only about this one particular poem. She writes about who should get the job of translating "The Hill We Climb And Other Poems". Now, I think the commission was just for an edition of the single poem (the full collection is not coming out till autumn, I believe) but Deul clearly and specifically writes and other poems. Perhaps she just hadn't researched much. She doesn't say anything in her article about her issue being just with the inauguration poem because of its special significance, nor does she mention Black Lives Matter. She only makes these points later when she is interviewed by the BBC. I also disagree with your suggestion that "Rijneveld's lack of experience in this field is (Deul’s) main objection. Race and gender identity are secondary to that". Deul mentions all three things (spoken-word experience, race and gender) but the bulk of her focus seems centred on Gorman's youth, beauty, fashion sense and status as a role model for black women and girls. She doesn't say anything about the particular nuances of spoken word or the challenges of translating it for someone outside the field and, to be honest, doesn't come across as someone who is particularly knowledgeable about form, translation or poetry in general. It reads to me that her main objection, what she focuses on most, is that is Rijneveld doesn't share Gorman's experiences and identity. This is the bulk of her original article (Google translated from the Dutch, so a little clunky to read). After introducing herself as a fashion activist, she goes on:

"Anyway, language and fashion. Passions I share with Amanda Gorman, the African American spoken word artist, activist and poet, who suddenly became a sensation on January 20. Not only because of her flaming recitation and her hopeful and powerfully vulnerable poem The Hill We Climb, with the chicken-skin phrase 'There's always light. If only we are brave enough to see it. If only we are brave enough to be it', but also because of her fabulous inauguration look, complete with bright yellow Prada coat, red XXL designer hair band and braided up-do'. Her appearance inspired many. So much so that she was offered a contract with IMG Models, one of the world's leading modelling agencies. Something that was perceived by black women and girls worldwide as a legitimacy of their natural beauty. And now there is a translation of the work of the charismatic Gorman, who has now also earned a place in the Time 100 Next: the list of the leading American news magazine with influential (young) people who are the hope for the future. Among them: environmentalist Greta Thunberg, the multi-talented R&B sisters Chloe x Halle (Bailey), covid vaccine researcher Aurelia Nguyen, model and activist Paloma Elsesser and 95 other influencers, researchers, businessmen, entertainers and politicians, of whom we are probably still very going to hear a lot. 

Translation Rights
The translation rights of Gorman's work were fought over, a battle won by the widely respected Meulenhoff. The publisher will present a special Dutch edition of The Hill We Climb and Other Poems on 20 March, introduced by Oprah Winfrey and translated by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. An incomprehensible choice, in my view and that of many others who expressed their pain, frustration, anger and disappointment via social media. Harvard alumna Gorman, raised by a single mother and labelled a 'special needs ' child due to speech problems, describes herself as 'skinny Black girl'. And her work and life are colored by her experiences and identity as a black woman. Isn't it - to say the least - a missed opportunity to hire Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for this job? She is white, non-binary, has no experience in this field, but is Meulenhoff's 'dream translator’?

Such a vote of confidence is not often awarded to people of color. On the contrary, whether in fashion, art, business, politics or literature, the merits and qualities of black people are only sporadically valued - if seen at all. Something that applies squared to black women, who are systematically marginalized.
Nothing to the detriment of Rijneveld's qualities, but why not opt for a literator who - just like Gorman - is a spoken word artist , young, female and: unapologetically Black ?"

She then goes on to name some female, black, spoken word poets in the Netherlands who she thinks would do a better job and the article ends.


I don't have any issue with Deul expressing these opinions. Whether I agree with them or not, they’re reasonably expressed. I don't agree that "Most people are upset NOT about what Janice Deul actually said, but about bad-faith characterizations of it". I know people here have have been responding to the take in the Barrios opinion article I posted, but really I don't think it's what Deul did or didn't say, or whether she has been misinterpreted, that has "upset" people. People are free to express any opinion they like (within reason) and they do on social media every day. People wouldn't be "upset" about it, or even have heard much about it, if she hadn't been successful. That's the point. It's the increasing power of social media outrage in forcing publishers and artists to capitulate to its whims that disturbs people.

I agree there's some straw-manning in the Barrios article. Deul doesn't actually say that she thinks only black writers should translate other black writers etc. But I think it’s unfair to suggest that the reasons for Barrios’ possible hyperbole are “in order to enlist others in battling a perceived threat to her own livelihood as a translator”. Barrios is a successful, widely published writer and poet and I give her the benefit of the doubt that what she is writing is sincerely felt rather than motivated by her bank balance. I also think it unlikely that she would genuinely fear that her income from translating would be massively affected if it suddenly became the norm that she could no longer translate black writers. If anything, putting her head over the parapet to criticise this decision is more likely to lose her work. Also, that slippery slope Barrios alludes to is already being slid down. The notion of "staying in your own lane" regarding what is acceptable subject matter in literature is increasingly commonplace among ID politics inspired social media users. It's what led The Nation to apologise for publishing a poem for the first time in its 80 year history when Anders Wee dared to write a persona poem from the pov of a homeless black man.

You sidestepped Roger's hypothetical about Gorman translating Rijneveld, calling it Bizarro World because Gorman doesn't speak Dutch. What about a more generalised hypothetical. Following a social media campaign, a black, Dutch translator is pressured to step down from translating a collection by a white Midwestern farmer poet. Some campaigners claim it's because the poet wrote mainly in form and the translator mainly in free verse but the original essay prompting the uproar mainly focuses on the poet's status as a role model for working-class Mid-westerners and his strong white identity which no other group could possibly identify or empathise with. What do you imagine yours and the general response would be? Quite rightly, one of upset and indignation I would imagine. Because investing whiteness with quasi-mystical properties is something that only neo-Nazis and white supremacists do. Of course, I understand that historically oppressed and marginalized groups will justifiably be invested in a sense of their identity more than historically privileged groups, but I don't think it is something that should reasonably begin affecting editorial decisions.

I also wonder if Rijneveld really "voluntarily stepped down after sympathising with Deul's position" as you say, or if in fact they felt they had little choice after the social media outpouring of "pain, frustration, anger and disappointment" at their having got the job. To stubbornly dig in could risk them being labelled at best unfeeling and at worst racist. Given the nature of social media mob pressure, it's naive to think this was a completely free choice. I do also wonder if feeling "anger" and "pain" at the idea of a young, non-binary, Booker Prize winning author translating Amanda Gorman, simply because they have the wrong skin colour, or are not part of the spoken word scene, is a reasonable response. I'm aware this might not be a fashionable opinion.

Now, I could be very wrong here but I've started now so in for a penny...I find the notion of "The Hill We Climb" being “sacred to many Americans, but particularly to Black Americans” a bit hard to swallow. I have a problem with sacred texts in general, and I find the idea that all black Americans, or even the majority, see it like this to be a little patronising. Certainly it was a powerful and iconic moment, but is "sacred" pushing it? I’m sure many Americans, white and black, now look back at the inauguration with affection but see the moment for what it was beyond the symbolism: a talented, ambitious young woman getting a big stage with a crowd-pleasing poem and an incumbent administration disassociating itself from the previous, horrendous one in a very media savvy, striking way with a young, black, “modern” voice. The whole idea that there is something special, something sacred, in Blackness, or in any part of a person’s identity over which they have no choice, so that their inner essence and experiences can only be apprehended by someone sharing that identity, is the racial equivalent of the idea that there is something mystical in femininity. And where femininity is dogged with the Madonna/whore dichotomy, white notions of Blackness can be dogged by the sacred/profane dichotomy. I think it’s time we realised we are all just people, equally flawed and pained and bumbling through life and equally capable of the very best and worst of humanity. Art should be about recognising this common humanity and frailty. Again, very unfashionable opinions no doubt and probably informed by my privilege as a straight, white man. And I do mean that genuinely, even though it probably sounds sarcastic.

As to the hypothetical question of whether Rijneveld would have been a good translator of Gorman’s poem, when I read their “response poem” after they stepped down I was struck by two things. The first was how ambivalent it was. The way I read it, they seem to spend the first four stanzas of the six stanza poem expressing their deeply held belief in the notion of empathy in art, of being “able to put yourself / in another’s shoes, to see the sea of sorrow behind another / person’s eyes”, of decrying (in the first stanza) “pulpit preaching…the Word that says what is / right or wrong”, of the need to “face up to all the bullies and fight pigeonholing with your fists raised” and “all of humankind’s boxing in”. This, along with the telling title, reads to me like someone very much of the mind that translation in poetry is an art that transcends racial boundaries and embraces the common humanity of the human race. That having a young marginalised white woman translate the words of a young, marginalised black woman would actually be a positive thing and the deluge of social media criticism was not something they instinctively agreed with. It’s only in the last two stanzas that the poem turns and begins to sound like more an “apology”. And the poem is at its weakest and most prosaic here, like it was written under some form of mental duress. And tellingly, they end on the unifying, defiant note that people should “straighten together our backs”. I felt quite sad reading it.

The second thing that struck me was how easily I could hear the poem in my inner ear with the recognisable rhythms and cadence of spoken word poetry, with its long, flowing, incantatory sentences and rhetorical repetition of “Never lost that”. I think they would have been a fine choice.

I echo what Roger said here:

Of course I would have had absolutely no objection whatsoever had they originally selected a young black woman to be the translator. In fact, it would have made a lot of sense and no one would have questioned it in any way. What rankles me a bit is that they didn't do that. They chose someone else. That was their choice. Gorman was fine with it. But somehow other people got into the act and told Gorman that her own choice was wrong and it was a horrible gaffe that had to be apologized for.

Ultimately, I see this as another example of publishers and artists being pressured into bad, anti-art decisions by fashionable notions of identity politics which have zero impact on the actual lives of the poorest and most disadvantaged in society, of which people of colour make up a significant number.

Here’s Rijneveld’s poem:

Everything inhabitable

Never lost that resistance, that primal jostling with sorrow and joy,
or given in to pulpit preaching, to the Word that says what is
right or wrong, never been too lazy to stand up, to face
up to all the bullies and fight pigeonholing with your fists
raised, against those riots of not-knowing inside your head,

tempering impotence with the red rag in your eyes, and
always announcing your own way with rock-solid pride,
watching someone reduced to pulp and seeing the last
drop of dignity trickling away, you are against craniometry,
against bondservice, against all of humankind’s boxing in.

Never lost that resistance, that seed of wrestling free, your
origin is dressed in mourning attire, your origin was fortunate,
it had an escape route, not that your experience is aligned,
not that you always see that the grass on the other side may be
withered and less green – the point is to be able to put yourself

in another’s shoes, to see the sea of sorrow behind another
person’s eyes, the rampant wrath of all wraths, you
want to say that maybe you don’t understand everything,
that of course you don’t always hit the right chord, but that
you do feel it, yes, you feel it, even if the difference is a gap.

Never lost that resistance and yet able to grasp when it
isn’t your place, when you must kneel for a poem because
another person can make it more inhabitable; not out of
unwillingness, not out of dismay, but because you know
there is so much inequality, people still discriminated against,

what you want is fraternity, you want one fist, and maybe your
hand isn’t yet powerful enough, or maybe you should first take the hand
of another in reconciliation, you actively need to feel the hope that
you are doing something to improve the world, though you mustn’t
forget this: stand up again after kneeling and straighten together our backs.


Anyway. Here we go again. All the best to you, Julie.

[Martin Elster]

From: The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray

We are going through a great crowd derangement. In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant. The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes. Various explanations have been given. These tend to suggest that any and all madnesses are the consequence of a Presidential election, or a referendum. But none of these explanations gets to the root of what is happening. For far beneath beneath these day-to-day events are much greater movements and much bigger events. It is time we began to confront the true causes of what is going wrong. Even the origin of this condition is rarely acknowledged. This is the simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives have collapsed. One by one the narratives we had were refuted, became unpopular to defend or impossible to sustain.

The explanations for our existence that used to be provided by religion went first, falling away from the nineteenth century onwards. Then over the last century the secular hopes held out by all political ideologies began to follow in religion’s wake. In the latter part of the twentieth century we entered the postmodern era. An era which defined itself, and was defined, by its suspicion towards all grand narratives. However, as all schoolchildren learn, nature abhors a vacuum, and into the postmodern vacuum new ideas began to creep, with the intention of providing explanations and meanings of their own. It was inevitable that some pitch would be made for the deserted ground. People in wealthy Western democracies today could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose. Whatever else they lacked, the grand narratives of the past at least gave life meaning.

The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich where we can and have whatever fun is on offer – was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years is to engage in new battles, ever fiercer campaigns and ever more niche demands. To find meaning by waging a constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question which may itself have just been reframed and the answer to which has only just been altered. The unbelievable speed of this process has been principally caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook) now have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’. Yet although we are being aggravated by a tech world which is running faster than our legs are able to carry us to keep up with it, these wars are not being fought aimlessly. They are consistently being fought in a particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unknowing in some people, deliberate in others – is to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will.

Murray, Douglas. The Madness of Crowds (pp. 8-9). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
. . . . .

When Martin Luther King Jr addressed the crowds from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on 28 August 1963, he appealed not only to foundations of justice in the founding traditions and principles of America; he also made the most eloquent defence anyone has ever made about the right way in which to treat other human beings. He spoke not only after centuries in which black Americans had been first slaves and then second-class citizens, but in an era during which racist laws were still on the statute books in American states. Racial segregation laws including anti-miscegenation laws were still in place, able to punish couples from different racial backgrounds who had fallen in love.

It was Dr King’s great central moral insight that in the future about which he dreamed his children should ‘one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’. Although many people have attempted to live up to that hope and many have succeeded, in recent years an insidious current has developed that has chosen to reject Dr King’s dream, and insist that content of character is nothing compared to the colour of someone’s skin. It has decided that skin colour is everything.

—Murray, Douglas. The Madness of Crowds (p. 142). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[Julie Steiner]

Martin,

Suggesting that race doesn't or shouldn't matter, or wouldn't if racial, ethnic, and gender minorities weren't making such a big deal about it, overlooks the fact that these identities usually ARE noticeable and DO matter, a lot, both to others and to ourselves. They are central to our first impressions of others and to our sense of belonging within a wider community, through bonds sometimes strengthened by cultural factors like religion, language, music, dance, food, etc.

Claiming that people are somehow doing something wrong when others choose to identify them as Other and choose to treat them differently because of that, rather than judging them by the content of their character, seems unrealistic at best, and victim-blaming at worst, if that treatment is negative.

Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell

I don't want to labour this point, but in her original article, where she had time and space to clearly state her position, Deul doesn’t specify that she is talking only about this one particular poem. She writes about who should get the job of translating "The Hill We Climb And Other Poems". Now, I think the commission was just for an edition of the single poem (the full collection is not coming out till autumn, I believe) but Deul clearly and specifically writes and other poems.

No, you're not wrong, Mark. I was wrong. The Hill We Climb and Other Poems is the name of the collection due out in September. (An edition of "The Hill We Climb" is being released as a single poem in March.)

There goes my thesis that the commissioned translation project was for a single poem. (Although the March release will be of a single poem.) And that Deul was only talking about a single poem.

I also disagree with your suggestion that "Rijneveld's lack of experience in this field is (Deul’s) main objection. Race and gender identity are secondary to that". Deul mentions all three things (spoken-word experience, race and gender) but the bulk of her focus seems centred on Gorman's youth, beauty, fashion sense and status as a role model for black women and girls. [...]

Okay, you've persuaded me of that, too. Thanks for taking the time to construct a solidly evidence-based argument.

I don't have any issue with Deul expressing these opinions. Whether I agree with them or not, they’re reasonably expressed. I don't agree that "Most people are upset NOT about what Janice Deul actually said, but about bad-faith characterizations of it". It isn't what she did or didn't say, or whether she has been misinterpreted, that has "upset" people. People are free to express any opinion they like (within reason) and they do on social media every day. People wouldn't be "upset" about it, or even have heard much about it, if she hadn't been successful. That's the point. It's the increasing power of social media outrage in forcing publishers and artists to capitulate to its whims that disturbs people.

Oh. Thanks for the correction.

I agree there's some straw-manning in the Barrios article. Deul doesn't actually say that she thinks only black writers should translate other black writers etc. But I think it’s unfair to suggest that the reasons for Barrios’ possible hyperbole are “in order to enlist others in battling a perceived threat to her own livelihood as a translator”.

Barrios is a successful, widely published writer and poet and I give her the benefit of the doubt that what she is writing is sincerely felt rather than motivated by her bank balance. I also think it unlikely that she would genuinely fear that her income from translating would be massively affected if it suddenly became the norm that she could no longer translate black writers. If anything, putting her head over the parapet to criticise this decision is more likely to lose her work.

Aw, dang it, I was straw-manning Barrios, wasn't I?

Well, this is awkward.

Thanks for calling me out on it in such a calm, kind way. Not that I would have expected any different from you, but it's a rare gift to receive such courteous correction these days. ​

Also, that slippery slope Barrios alludes to is already being slid down. The notion of "staying in your own lane" regarding what is acceptable subject matter in literature is increasingly commonplace among ID politics inspired social media users. It's what led The Nation to apologise for publishing a poem for the first time in its 80 year history when Anders Wee dared to write a persona poem from the pov of a homeless black man.

Roxane Gay had a helpful, nuanced series of Tweets (since taken down, but it was quoted in a blog here) on the concept of "staying in your own lane":

The reality is that when most white writers use AAVE [African American Vernacular English, as in Anders Carlson-Wee's homeless POV poem] they do so badly. They do so without understanding that it is a language with rules. Instead, they use AAVE to denote that there is a black character in their story because they understand blackness as a monolith. Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy. And using AAVE badly is lazy so I am entirely comfortable suggesting that writers stay in their lane when it comes to dialect. The great thing about writing is that you can develop new lanes through research, immersion and…effort. There was none of that in this poem.

Mark, I know that you have very strong feelings on this point with regard to the creation of characters in drama and comedy, as well as in personal poems. You see possible empathy-building through those portrayals, while I see only the perpetuation of cartoonish stereotypes rather than of genuine understanding. We've already failed to persuade each other on that point.

But I still think that people in privileged groups should not try to speak for people who have traditionally not had opportunities to make their voices heard, but who may be perfectly capable of speaking for themselves now. However well-intentioned the White person is who tries to speak on their behalf, they still don't get to speak while he or she is speaking. And wouldn't firsthand witness be more accurate, anyway?

That was the problem (as I see it--after having just gotten the above problem wrong) with the 40-page poem in Poetry, by the white poet whose white narrator occasionally quoted the banal racism of his white grandmother. White guys, collectively speaking, have had plenty of opportunities to have their views heard on everything, and when they are given 40 pages in which to blather away on race, no one else can get a word in edgewise.

I also wonder if Rijneveld really "voluntarily stepped down after sympathising with Deul's position" as you say, or if in fact they felt they had little choice after the social media outpouring of "pain, frustration, anger and disappointment" at their having got the job. To stubbornly dig in could risk them being labelled at best unfeeling and at worst racist. Given the nature of social media mob pressure, it's naive to think this was a completely free choice. I do also wonder if feeling "anger" and "pain" at the idea of a young, non-binary, Booker Prize winning author translating Amanda Gorman, simply because they have the wrong skin colour, or are not part of the spoken word scene, is a reasonable response. I'm aware this might not be a fashionable opinion.

Now, I could be very wrong here but I've started now so in for a penny...I find the notion of "The Hill We Climb" being “sacred to many Americans, but particularly to Black Americans” a bit hard to swallow. I have a problem with sacred texts in general, and I find the idea that all black Americans, or even the majority, see it like this to be a little patronising. Certainly it was a powerful and iconic moment, but is "sacred" pushing it? I’m sure many Americans, white and black, now look back at the inauguration with affection but see the moment for what it was beyond the symbolism: a talented, ambitious young woman getting a big stage with a crowd-pleasing poem and an incumbent administration disassociating itself from the previous, horrendous one in a very media savvy, striking way with a young, black, “modern” voice. The whole idea that there is something special, something sacred, in Blackness, or in any part of a person’s identity over which they have no choice, so that their inner essence and experiences can only be apprehended by someone sharing that identity, is the racial equivalent of the idea that there is something mystical in femininity. And where femininity is dogged with the Madonna/whore dichotomy, white notions of Blackness can be dogged by the sacred/profane dichotomy. I think it’s time we realised we are all just people, equally flawed and pained and bumbling through life and equally capable of the very best and worst of humanity. Art should be about recognising this common humanity and frailty. Again, very unfashionable opinions no doubt and probably informed by my privilege as a straight, white man. And I do mean that genuinely, even though it probably sounds sarcastic.

No worries, Mark. Maybe I am being patronizing and presumptuous by saying Black Americans may be more likely than Americans of other races to feel a special connection to this poem, but I don't think so. If your objection is only to the word "sacred," these essays don't use that word, but they sure come close:

Her cadence steady, so sure yet measured, a sort of melodic sermon like Maya Angelou. [...] Amanda was a theologian in the truest sense of the word — she was making divine possibilities intelligible and offering an alternative world of love, freedom, hope and joy. Theology is not just speaking or wrestling; it is also helping us dream a little bit of the future God has for us. It is pondering the actual, imagining the possible.

(Danté Stewart in Religion News)

“Only that which has form can snatch one up into a state of rapture,” wrote the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. “Only through form can the lightning-bolt of eternal beauty flash. Without form, in any event, a person will not be captivated and transported. To be transported, moreover, belongs to the very origin of Christianity. The Apostles were transported by what they saw, heard, and touched.”

Amanda Gorman transported me. I believed in the light and the goodness and the vision of holiness Ms. Gorman laid out because she offered it to me as music and image and breath. I would not believe in what is good and true if it were shouting at me, deadpan, no color or image in its offering.

Erika Rasmussin in America Magazine

Granted, this kind of language is not entirely unexpected in venues like Religion News and America Magazine (a Jesuit publication).

As to the hypothetical question of whether Rijneveld would have been a good translator of Gorman’s poem, when I read their “response poem” after they stepped down I was struck by two things. The first was how ambivalent it was. The way I read it, they seem to spend the first four stanzas of the six stanza poem expressing their deeply held belief in the notion of empathy in art, of being “able to put yourself / in another’s shoes, to see the sea of sorrow behind another / person’s eyes”, of decrying (in the first stanza) “pulpit preaching…the Word that says what is / right or wrong”, of the need to “face up to all the bullies and fight pigeonholing with your fists raised” and “all of humankind’s boxing in”. This, along with the telling title, reads to me like someone very much of the mind that translation in poetry is an art that transcends racial boundaries and embraces the common humanity of the human race. That having a young marginalised white woman translate the words of a young, marginalised black woman would actually be a positive thing and the deluge of social media criticism was not something they instinctively agreed with. It’s only in the last two stanzas that the poem turns and begins to sound like more an “apology”. And the poem is at its weakest and most prosaic here, like it was written under some form of mental duress. And tellingly, they end on the unifying, defiant note that people should “straighten together our backs”. I felt quite sad reading it.

I think your assessment is reasonable, and I, too, sensed sadness and loss in the poem, along with the desire to unify.

I found the link to the Rijneveld's poem just after having posted, and although I realized that it torpedoed many of my conjectures, I thought it would be helpful to the discussion to include it. But I didn't have any more time to spend, so I just cut it, pasted it, and turned it red so people wouldn't miss it.

The second thing that struck me was how easily I could hear the poem in my inner ear with the recognisable rhythms and cadence of spoken word poetry, with its long, flowing, incantatory sentences and rhetorical repetition of “Never lost that”. I think they would have been a fine choice.

I don't know. Maybe your ear is better than mine. I'm still not quite convinced that Rijneveld would have done as good a job or better.

Over the past twenty years, I've posted any number of really cringeworthy attempts at translating rhymed, metered poetry to the Translation Board here. And a handful of decent ones. And two or three good ones.

I know that in large part, my verse translation failures have been due to unique personality and processing flaws that make it difficult for me to perceive what the original poet was thinking and feeling. Which in turn makes it nearly impossible to convey the same with any degree of success. And also I am often reluctant to sacrifice things like perfect rhyme, when doing so might be the only way to preserve another aspect of the poem that is more important. But I am vain enough to think that for the most part, my failures have been due to the fact that rhymed, rhythmic translations are just really difficult to do well. Such a high-visibility performance poem, or set of poems, doesn't seem like an ideal learn-on-the-job opportunity for someone who almost never works in form.

But maybe I'm wrong, and Rijneveld's translation would have been brilliant. it seems that no one will ever know.

All I know is that whoever the substitute or substitutes are will now have a nearly-impossible-to-please audience judging their work.

Ultimately, I see this as another example of art being forced into bad, anti-art decisions via the dictates of fashionable notions of identity politics which have zero impact on the actual lives of the poorest and most disadvantaged in society, of which people of colour make up a significant number.

I don't quite follow your gist about identity politics having zero impact on the lives of the poorest and most disadvantaged in society. Or do you mean that the "anti-art decisions" make no difference to these people's situations?

Thanks again for your time and thought, Mark, and if you don't have the time or energy to engage with this right now, feel free to take a break and come back to it in a few days or weeks.

I think you added another paragraph in the middle after I started replying, so apologies if you've changed other things that I didn't notice. I'll go back to look at what you said in the morning.

Sheesh, it's 3am here now. I keep telling myself not to do stuff like this. I'm sure you know the feeling, Mark!

[conny]

Appropriation is most harmful to minorities, which is mostly why it’s
so offensive. And anti-art, no question. No black Hamlet maybe?
not many minority roles in Shakespeare. No openly gay people
Allowed either I suppose. Even no women come to that, considering
all the female roles were originally played by men.

what worries me most is that if that’s the game its only a matter of time
Before some English fascist will try and plant his big, white fascist flag
on the English language itself. We own the language: It’s ours: and no
One else can play with our ball. If you’d like to go and find your own
Language then fine, but we own this one because, well, we’re English....

[Julie Steiner]

Dave, if someone were to claim the English language as English-only, would they have to give all the loanwords and calques back? Heh.

And if we're getting technical, the casting of Hamlet wouldn't be just restricted to Whites, but to Whites of Danish ancestry, in which case a lot of White English actors would still be out of a job.

Seriously, though, I don't see why no Black Hamlets would be allowed. There's a long tradition of resetting Shakespeare in modern times, the 1920s, etc., in which multicultural casts make sense. And also a very long history of women playing Hamlet, including women of color. It's way too late to put that genie back in the bottle.

I'm pretty sure we won't be seeing any more blackface White Othellos for awhile, though. However long that tradition is. Current casting and costuming decisions are less a matter of whether a White actor can do justice to the role, and more about the troubling history of blackface. And to a lesser degree, about giving non-White actors Shakespearean leading role opportunities, which have not been available to them until relatively recently.

Speaking of cultural appropriation, there's a reason we've yet to hear Danes complain about exaggerated ethnic stereotypes in Hamlet, or Scots complain about them in Macbeth. Or Greeks about depictions in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Etc. And that reason is that exaggerated ethnic stereotypes of Danes, Scots, Greeks, etc., aren't there. The anti-Semitism in the depiction of Shylock is, but so is Shylock's humanizing speech. Whether those two things really offset each other is debatable, of course.

In recent years, I've attended two productions of Mozart in which the libretto's sexism and/or cultural appropriation was obvious. Both productions chose to present those depictions as in the original had had them, but with significant pauses added for the audience to softly hiss or throat-clear after the now-offensive lines. I thought that this expression of solidarity by the audience made these productions far more meaningful and engaging experiences for everyone, including the women and the members of the appropriated culture, than censorship or tinkering would have.

Mark, here's the bit I missed in your post--probably due to an editing error on my part rather than a later addition:

You sidestepped Roger's hypothetical about Gorman translating Rijneveld, calling it Bizarro World because Gorman doesn't speak Dutch.

I called Roger's hypothetical a Bizarro World situation not because Gorman doesn't speak Dutch, but because Whites in both the United States and in the Netherlands are pretty much the default, and Blacks in both are the exception. Or one kind of exception. Definitely not the default, anyway.

What about a more generalised hypothetical. Following a social media campaign, a black, Dutch translator is pressured to step down from translating a collection by a white Midwestern farmer poet. Some campaigners claim it's because the poet wrote mainly in form and the translator mainly in free verse but the original essay prompting the uproar mainly focuses on the poet's status as a role model for working-class Mid-westerners and his strong white identity which no other group could possibly identify or empathise with. What do you imagine yours and the general response would be? Quite rightly, one of upset and indignation I would imagine. Because investing whiteness with quasi-mystical properties is something that only neo-Nazis and white supremacists do. Of course, I understand that historically oppressed and marginalized groups will justifiably be invested in a sense of their identity more than historically privileged groups, but I don't think it is something that should reasonably begin affecting editorial decisions.

In order to engineer a truly equivalent situation, you'd first have to reverse which race is the majority and minority in each country, and then reverse the races of the poet and the two translators. But reimagining the racial composition of two entire countries is so unwieldy that at that point the thought experiment ceases to be a meaningful exercise at all.

BTW, in my view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with White people taking pride in their own race or ethnicities or religions or other cultural signifiers. It's only when they feel the need to sneer at, suppress, exclude, or discriminate against other people's races or ethnicities in order to feel secure about their own--which is what neo-Nazis and White supremacists do--that I have a problem with White pride.

[conny]

Yes, exactly. I was kinda joking obviously, in poor taste, but
All that is true.

As a serious point though my worry is things being seen as
One thing or the other. Appropriation works both ways, which I
don’t think anyone has said yet. Yes, we claim something as our
Own: but...we also decide that something else is yours. That’s the
Dangerous bit imo.

Things are kind of at that point now. Everything with a little flag
on it. novelists, poets, acting roles, plays. I think the phrase is...
stay in your lane....which is a goddam depressing thought.

[Julie Steiner]

Personally, I think the following factors should be considered when determining whether getting out of one's lane is acceptable, or even commendable:

1. Goodwill vs. Selfishness. Does the artist's main motive in attempting this representation seem to be that of promoting deeper or broader understanding? Or does the artist seem to be more motivated by a desire to exploit a trendy or exotically novel theme for profit (monetary, political, or notoriety/publicity-wise)?

2. Enough Respect to Do One's Homework. Has the artist done the proper research to make sure that the depiction does not mis-represent any aspects of the other culture, gender, etc.? Or is the artist simply relying on readymade clichés and unexamined stereotypes?

3. The Fairness of Any Implied Broader Implications. Are the strengths and flaws of these fictional characters--and yes, all fictional characters must be flawed in order to have any verisimilitude or interest--likely to be taken as applying to others with the same cultural or gender traits? And if so, is that a fair implication?

4. Quality of the Resulting Work. Obviously it's much easier to look kindly on a depiction if it is part of something excellent.

An example of an artist who has successfully gotten out of his lane is Kazuo Ishiguro, the 2017 Nobel-prizewinning author of books with unreliable narrators who are obviously different from himself in various ways, such as the painfully repressed English butler in The Remains of the Day and the eventually stoic Kathy H. in Never Let Me Go. Even Ishiguro has had some misses along with his lane-changing hits; some of his choices definitely work better than others. But when he gets it right, it's great.

And there are of course many other such artists. Wally Lamb's eerie inhabitation of an obese female narrator in She's Come Undone comes to mind. And yes, body size is an identity.

Perhaps others can add to this list of successful lane-changers, or add to (or subtract from) this list of guidelines.

The factors are somewhat different when evaluating a publisher's or producer's decisions. But I've yammered on long enough and will let others discuss those if they wish.

[Martin Elster]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

Martin,

Suggesting that race doesn't or shouldn't matter, or wouldn't if racial, ethnic, and gender minorities weren't making such a big deal about it, overlooks the fact that these identities usually ARE noticeable and DO matter, a lot, both to others and to ourselves. They are central to our first impressions of others and to our sense of belonging within a wider community, through bonds sometimes strengthened by cultural factors like religion, language, music, dance, food, etc.

Claiming that people are somehow doing something wrong when others choose to identify them as Other and choose to treat them differently because of that, rather than judging them by the content of their character, seems unrealistic at best, and victim-blaming at worst, if that treatment is negative.

I wrote something in response to this and thought I may post it, but then I found this talk on YouTube, which I think answers what you wrote better than me.

Coleman Hughes on The Case for Color-blindness S2 [Bonus Episode]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq6xJ2vFlaA

[Julie Steiner]

Martin, I agree with most of the substance of what Coleman Hughes says in this video, but the way in which he says it drives me bonkers. Statements like "We are all the same under the skin" and "Skin color is irrelevant" are maddeningly simplistic, to the point of being very unhelpful for any discussion of racism.

Racism, like race, is more than just skin deep.

Racial identities--which everyone has, both of ourselves and of everyone else we meet--are based on many things, including but not limited to visible things like skin color, eye shape, lip size, hair texture, etc. There are cultural differences, too. So I really wish that if Hughes MEANS "race and ethnicity" rather than "skin color," he would stop using unhelpful terms like "skin color" and "colorblindness" that suggest that he's only talking about melanin.

Yes, Martin Luther King, Jr., did indeed say in 1963, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” However, this is NOT necessarily evidence that Martin Luther King, Jr., would have endorsed the notion of "colorblind" public policy, as defined by people like Coleman Hughes in the 2020s.

Martin Luther King, Jr., also said the following in 1968 about reparations for slavery, which to me strongly suggests that he felt race was NOT irrelevant and should NOT be ignored in public policy decisions:

America freed the slaves in 1863 through the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, but gave the slaves no land, nothing in reality to get started on. At the same time, America was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the Midwest, which meant that there was a willingness to give the white peasants from Europe an economic base and yet it refused to give its black peasants from Africa who came here involuntarily, in chains, and had worked for free for 244 years, any kind of economic base. So Emancipation for the Negro was really freedom to hunger. It was freedom to the winds and rains of heaven. It was freedom without food to eat or land to cultivate and therefore it was freedom and famine at the same time. And when white Americans tell the negro to lift himself by his own bootstraps they don’t look over the legacy of slavery and segregation. I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And many negroes by the thousands and millions have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression and as a result of a society that has deliberately made his color a stigma and something worthless and degrading.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Remarks Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., (March 31, 1968)

That is not the statement of someone who was colorblind or raceblind. It's an acknowledgment that the socioeconomic damage suffered by "the Negro" has been so severe and multigenerational that financial compensation should be considered.

If Coleman Hughes wants to argue that most policies to address inequity should be based on socioeconomic factors, rather than race, that's great. I actually agree with him about that, for the most part (and also about the important exceptions he identifies, such as recognizing the value of making sure various racial and ethnic communities are represented in police forces, rather than making those hiring decisions without regard to race).

But "colorblindness" is a horribly unhelpful term.

I was very glad to hear Hughes acknowledge that equality and equity are different things, in his answer to this question. And he even went further to discuss removing the sorts of systemic barriers to equality that make equity programs necessary in order for things to be fair.

However, this view is widely shared by people concerned with all sorts of diversity, including disability.

Consider this:



And this:



Maybe "colorblindness" would say it doesn't matter that no People of Color are represented in the above graphics. But people Hughes would identity with Critical Race Theory still share the above images, to illustrate that both equality and equity are just treating the symptoms of a larger societal disease.

Both of these sets of images are focused on eventually finding solutions that address the systemic sources the problem. Hughes himself agrees (see bolding below) that the best solution is to fix an unfair system, rather than to fix the people disadvantaged by an unfair system. And I agree with him that addressing the economic results of racism is more equitable than focusing only on race.

But so do most people who are anti-racists, including those he characterizes as CRT proponents. These are pretty standard graphics in diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops.

Two sections from the video that I transcribed. Apologies for any typos:

"Would colorblindness, then, be dismissive of media representation, and existing diversity programs in areas such as STEM? Would it implicate a really staunch defense of meritocratic systems?"

Hughes: I would say in general, yes. The answer to that is yes. I think there are exceptions to that rule. I think, for example, if you run a police department, the value of racial diversity in having a police department that reflects the community being policed is so great that it outweighs the importance of a strict, race-blind meritocracy. However, in most cases, that's not true.

A few things:

One, I think what most people actually want, as demonstrated by the pupils I've cited, is a system that is fair. A system that, whatever outcome it yields, was arrived at through a fair process. It think we misidentify the problem as inequality in itself, rather than unfairness and poverty.

So, for example, nobody actually laments the fact that great athletes are extremely well-paid, because it's so obvious that athletics is a completely meritocratic domain. It's obvious to anyone who watches soccer or the NBA or the MLB.

Now in these other domains, there are legitimate questions. In admissions to colleges, if your parent is a professor (which obviously skews white), if your parent is a donor (which also skews white), you're not getting a meritocracy in the door, either. You're getting a leg up. And people understandably feel, "Well if many kids get a leg up in these things, and those kids are disproportionately white, then why not have affirmative action to balance that out?" And I think that's actually a legitimate argument.

At the end of the day, meritocracy is such a good idea that we should always have it in our sights as our North Star--to progressively make progress toward a society where all these arbitrary, unearned privileges are equalized. I do believe in that.

But what many diversity programs end up being are soft quotas. Quotas in practice, right? Where we need this many people who look this way in order to insulate ourselves from the critique that our process is racist.

What it does is...it certainly puts the idea that any black person hired is a diversity hire. Even if nobody says it out loud, people think it. And it may not be true.

It also masks the actual problems of the pipeline issues of under-preparedness in the Black community that could in principle be addressed, and that should probably be Item Number One on the agenda of any anti-racist. Item Number One, in other words, should be "How do we create an education system and a culture and community of entrepreneurship and success, that in the long run gets rid of the need for programs that give us a leg up?"

Because there is only one way of achieving long-term prosperity and success as a people. And that is to cultivate the skills and values that reliably lead to success in what we now have, which is an information economy. That's the one way. All of the other ways are stop-gap solutions. It's duct tape on a sinking ship. There is one long-term solution to that problem, and that's where many charter schools have been doing a good job of pointing a path towards that, and there are nonprofits doing good work. But that's what I would say to that.

"My question goes back more towards the affirmative action in college admissions. I was wondering...Given the correlation pattern we currently see between race and ethnicity and education achievement, and the fact that (as you said) the general public shows support for colorblindness in college admissions, do you think that more socioeconomically based affirmative action programs would do a better job at addressing inequality while while maintaining colorblindness, or do you think that that solution would also fall short, due to the fact that we do not currently live in a colorblind world, and it would fail to address the unique experiences that minority students faced when compared to their White peers?"

Good question. One thing I would say just to frame it is....

Often it's portrayed in the media and in the public as if it's race conscious policy, like affirmative action--it's a choice between that, and [...] doing nothing to help Black people. And given those two options, it kind of seems like a no-brainer to go with the first.

But it's a false choice. The real choice is between policy based on skin color and policy based on socioeconomics. And then, the key question to ask is, which one of those is a better indication of privation and lack of privilege? Is it skin color, or is it socioeconomics?

I would certainly argue it's the latter. And insofar as we have the best proxy for disadvantage in our hands, we shouldn't go to the second- or third-best proxy. So yes, I would be...If it makes sense to correct for anything, socioeconomics makes much more sense for a college to care about than skin color.

And you see, you know, the product, the result of caring exclusively about, or largely about, skin color, at elite universities especially, like Harvard, is that probably half of the Black students on campus (and there are a few studies from the mid-2000s on this) are children of Black immigrants, recent Black immigrants to the country, not Black Americans descended from slavery. And many of them are, you know, middle-class Black immigrant kids. It's not...

Which just goes to show it's not...skin color is not a great proxy for disadvantage in these kinds of cases. So the extent that affirmative action is justified in terms of helping people who have less advantage, that's actually an argument for basing it on socioeconomics rather than race.

Again, I am mostly in agreement with Hughes' points, but I disagree that "skin color" and "race" are synonyms. And since, as he says near the beginning of his talk, the self-congratulatory expression "I don't see color" by privileged people unwilling to recognize inequity exists is not what he means by being "colorblind," why on earth does he keep using a term that he knows is widely misunderstood and misused?

As for to the Amanda Gorman translation situation, I think this is clearly one of the exceptional cases like police hiring, in which racial identity matters for reasons of representation. After all, the fact that she is a young, Black, female poet is a large part of why she was chosen by Biden as his Inaugural Poet in the first place. I agree with the Dutch essayist I referred to in an earlier post, who said that Gorman's identity as a young, Black female at this moment of history is part of the message, and that the matter of representation would ideally have been considered in the choice of translator.

[Julie Steiner]

I assume that those who are tired of this thread can just ignore it. Anyway two things:

The American Literary Translators Association has issued a statement on their website that is well worth reading.

And the New York Times published an update last Friday:
Amanda Gorman’s Poetry United Critics. It’s Dividing Translators.

Below are snippets from that article, about how the German translation was handled by a team (a decision made before the controversy about the Dutch and Catalan translations started). And also some snippets about the Greek and Swedish versions.

German

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.

[...]

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.

Hmmm. I don't know about that. I was under the impression that the phrase "skinny Black girl" in Gorman's original was intended to connote someone whom others might dismiss as a lightweight, so I wonder if the German translators may have missed the mark by trying to avoid a negative image there. Continuing:

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.”

[...]

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.”

Personally, I can't see the vision of the final paragraph as a bad thing.

Other languages:

Greek

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.

My dream team: one of one of the three Antetokounmpo brothers who were all on the same basketball court last night (awwwww!!!!), who are fluent in both languages and might be available once the NBA playoffs are over, plus A.E. Stallings, plus another Greek poet or two to be named by Alicia. Not going to happen, but a nice thought.

Swedish and French

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.