[Julie Steiner]

Most people are upset NOT about what Janice Deul actually said, but about bad-faith characterizations of it.

That's where stuff is really getting lost in translation.

Bolding mine below, from a republished version of the Washington Post's coverage (in case people want to read the whole thing but don't have access to the WP):

“Isn’t it — to say the least — a missed opportunity to [have hired] Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for this job?” Dutch Journalist and activist Janice Deul wrote in a piece in Volkskrant, according to the Guardian’s translation. “They are white, nonbinary, have no experience in this field, but according to Meulenhoff are still the ‘dream translator’?”

Duel asked why instead a “spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black” — like Gorman sure — was not commissioned.

“I’m not saying a black person can’t translate white work, and vice versa,” Deul told the BBC. “But not this specific poem of this specific orator in this Black Lives Matter area, that’s the whole issue.”

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

She was not laying down rules for the translation of all works by young, black, female writers.

She was not even restricting the potential pool of translators for all works by Amanda Gorman.

She was only talking about the translation of this one poem.

I am in complete agreement with most of the general points about translation raised in all three of the statements I've seen by people hired to translate this poem (Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Nuria Barios, Victor Obiols). However only one of these translators--Rijneveld, the Dutch translator who voluntarily stepped down after sympathizing with Deul's sentiments--was responding to Deul's actual objections, rather than to straw men of their own construction.

For example, I can, and will, shout a hearty amen to the content of the penultimate paragraph below.

The context, though, makes it a slippery slope fallacy, since Deul's argument was only about the translation of one poem, out of the totality of world literature.

A Catalan translator has been removed from the task of translating the poem written and performed by National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman at President Joe Biden’s inauguration because he did not fit the “profile,” according to AFP.

The move by Barcelona publisher Univers marks the second instance of backlash in Europe against a white person being chosen to translate The Hill We Climb by Gorman.

Translator Victor Obiols told AFP on Wednesday that Univers had commissioned him last month to translate Gorman’s work into Catalan, a language spoken in Spain and Andorra. After he completed the job, the publishing house informed him that he “was not the right person,” he said.

“They told me that I am not suitable to translate it,” Obiols told AFP. “They did not question my abilities, but they were looking for a different profile, which had to be a woman, young, activist and preferably black.”

“It is a very complicated subject that cannot be treated with frivolity,” he continued. “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.”

Obiols said he would still be paid for his work.

Nuria Barrios seems to feel particularly threatened by what she calls "Deul's logic" starting us down a slippery slope to cultural perdition. But again, she's applying fallacious means to make her case. Look how her first sentence puts words in Deul's mouth and then attacks her fictional straw-man Deul for things that the real Deul quite demonstrably never said:

According to Deul, applying what we might call Deul logic, only whites can translate whites, only women can translate women, only trans people can translate trans people... And so on ad infinitum: only Mexicans can sing rancheras, only the Japanese can write haikus, and so on. And, of course, forget about translating Marcel Proust if you aren’t homosexual and have never tasted a madeleine.

The simple truth is that Deul is not talking about translation, she’s talking about politics. She confuses “moral right” with literary quality, ignoring the fact that imagination is what makes translation and art, in general, possible. Deul’s logic makes translators visible, when the essence of translators is to be invisible. Their voice embraces all voices. In order to be everyone, they must dissolve and be reborn; to come out of themselves in order to enter into others. Contrary to other disciplines in which the artist seeks to have a voice, a stamp, to be Someone, in translation excellence is to be Nobody. It is a matter of not being.

[...]

Deul has triumphed. Deul’s triumph is a catastrophe. It is the victory of identity politics over creative freedom, of the given over the imagination. From the pride of being who you are, we have moved on to the imperative, subject to penalization, of not being someone other than who you are: our skin has become a straitjacket. But art is hybrid, omnivorous, inapprehensible. To remove imagination from translation is to subject the craft to a lobotomy that makes it impossible to exercise.

Barrios' passionate eloquent may seem very compelling, but I hope everyone here can acknowledge how intellectually dishonest her argument actually is. Barrios is stooping to blatant mischaracterization in order to enlist others in battling a perceived threat to her own livelihood as a translator.

Let's also be fully cognizant of the fact that the right-wingers who accuse everyone but straight white males of playing divisive identity politics are themselves playing very divisive identity politics. Those of us who disagree with that agenda should be very, very cautious about endorsing any narrative of white victimhood without carefully checking its validity.