[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Kevin Rainbow

Rejecting an interracial combination - a black author and a white translator - based on race is a form of racism. It shouldn't be given a pass, anymore than any other manner of racism.

But what if the preference for a Black spoken word poet as translator is based on the fact that the original choice of translator is a White poet whose original poems are not in form (Rijneveld), while spoken word poets (a field in which Black poets predominate in the Netherlands, just as in the U.S.) do have expertise working with meter and rhyme?

Isn't that a racially-influenced distinction that is not actually motivated by racism?

[Edited to add: Note that in Deul's original statement, Rijneveld's lack of experience in this field is the main objection. Race and gender identity are secondary to that. Yet race has been made the central theme of the outcry, and the importance of rhyme and meter in Gorman's work, and the lack thereof in Rijneveld's work, has not been mentioned in a single complaint I've read about the translator changes.]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Yes, you did misunderstand my point. To state it more generally, I don't think that there is anyone in the Netherlands who has the same cultural background as anyone in the US. To suggest that the experience of being black is the same in any country is certainly incorrect. Not being an American is a more profound difference than not being black. Gorman's poem was fundamentally about the black experience in Amercia, where blacks were kidnapped and enslaved and remain to this day victims of that legacy. To me that is clearly different from living in a country because it offered you refuge.

As someone who has occasionally volunteered with various refugee resettlement groups in San Diego, I think you have an overly rosy idea of the level of groveling gratitude that refugees can be assumed to feel for the wonderful country that has given them refuge. This essay puts it beautifully, and helped me to understand the resentment I sensed when I would rattle on to these immigrant families about how lucky and grateful I was sure they must feel to finally be in the U.S. That essay helped me to realize that I hadn't been feeling empathy at all--I had just been projecting my own feel-good fantasy onto what remained for them a very stressful situation.

I think only the specifics of pecking order nastiness by those members of dominant groups prone to be nasty to their perceived inferiors [bullies] are unique to particular cultures. The broad outlines of the bullying are the same. And pecking orders that are based on physical features that cannot be hidden or changed have far more in common with each other than other kinds of power imbalances. Whether or not a culture has a local history of slavery doesn't seem relevant [although the Netherlands certainly participated in the Atlantic slave trade]. Admittedly, this is my personal opinion, based on evidence like my father-in-law's stories of the gratuitous nastiness he was subjected to as a Chinese immigrant by jerks at the University of Montana and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the 1950s--not areas noted for slaveholding.

I wonder what you would think if a black translator were fired because someone wrote a column claiming that she could not possibly relate to the experience of the original poet, who was white? If the chasm between them is disqualifying in one instance, isn't it precisely the same-sized chasm when viewed in the other direction? Should Gorman not get to translate Rijneveld’s poems into English?

Roger, for the two situations to be "precisely the same-sized chasm," the fired Black translator in your version would have to be in a Black-dominant society, with a history of second-class citizenship for Whites. Where is this fantasyland, and even if you did find one, how would a White translator living in that society have any special insight into the experience of the original [White] poet's position in her own society, unless that status were also disadvantaged?

Also, if a White translator is hired and paid in addition to the fired and paid Black one, [for any reason,] I really don't see who is harmed, except the publisher who had to pay twice for translating the same work.

And yes, absolutely, Gorman should NOT get to translate Rijneveld's poems into English, since I assume Gorman doesn't know any Dutch and therefore isn't qualified. (What the heck? You seem to be bending over backwards to manufacture some sort of Bizarro World racial equivalency flipside, where there is none. I understand the hypothetical impulse here, but it just doesn't hold up to any sort of scrutiny.)

I'd be interested to see a double-blind experiement. Let the original translator present his/her/their translation to a focus group of black female performance artists, and let the substitute translator present a translation as well. I wonder which the focus group would prefer? Are you really confident that it would necessarily be the replacement translator? I mean, it could be, but would you necessarily think it? Is it inevitable? Or would you maybe expect that the translator who is the better poet would be preferred? To me it's obvious that the better poet would be likely to create the better poem in translation.

My money's on the substitute translator. And yes, I am really confident about it. Here's why:

Here are English translations of five poems by the original translator, Rijneveld. The translations aren't rhymed or metered, because neither are the originals. The translator's note says:

Calf’s Caul is Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s earthy portrait of a rural upbringing devastated by the sudden death of a sibling, a family governed by grief and alcoholism, and the adolescent narrator’s profound struggle to make sense of gender and sexuality. Rijneveld approaches these subjects with an almost breathless stream of consciousness that is largely unconcerned with form.

Could it be that Rijneveld's inexperience with rhyme and meter--being "largely unconcerned with form"--played a role in their willingness to resign from this commission? Is it possible that they knew they were out of their depth, since cadence and rhyme are so important in Gorman's poem?

[Edited to say: Here's the English translation of the Dutch poem that Rijneveld published in the Guardian on Saturday, regarding their decision to resign.]

Isn't it possible that a practitioner of Dutch spoken word poetry, familiar with the effective use of rhythm and rhyme, might actually be "the better poet" to translate a rhymed, cadenced poem? Even if these qualifications weren't specifically mentioned in Deul's description of a more suitable translator, I think they are strongly implicit.

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.

I'd love to know what information was Amanda Gorman given by the publisher, when she was asked to make her decision regarding the Dutch translator. Maybe she was given the impression that the kinds of performance artists Deul knew of didn't exist, so she picked the best of the limited options the publisher gave her. And where was Dutch on the list of languages for which she was considering translators? Eighth? Twelfth? Maybe she was overwhelmed by that point, and just relied on the publisher's recommendation. Anyway, if she didn't know that translators who are practicing poets in a genre similar to her own exist in the Netherlands when she approved Rijneveld, now she does.

From my (White but formalist) perspective, a translator's experience working with meter and rhyme seems far more important than the color of the translator's skin, for this poem. That said, the color of the translator's skin is almost certainly a factor in the choice of meter and rhyme and performance as that person's chosen genre for self-expression.