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Unread 03-14-2021, 07:31 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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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.

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?

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.

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.
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