She is the darling of the nation, the star of the inauguration, the first US National Youth Poet Laureate: she is Amanda Gorman, the person who serenaded America and the new president with a SLAM poem. Naturally, of course, Gorman’s poems have become best-sellers, and she was praised by just about everyone. Now though, she appears to have gotten lost in translation.
Gorman’s verse is stuffed with clichés, so you can’t imagine it would take a particularly good writer to translate her. But Dutch publisher Meulenhoff managed to find an International Man Booker-winner to do so: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. Gorman herself approved of this decision. Now, though, the wisdom of the internet has spoken, and Rijneveld has resigned. Why? Because Rijneveld is white. And a black person, according to some activists, cannot be translated by someone who is white.
The first person to get worked up about this was Janice Deul. Writing in the Dutch paper de Volkskrant, Deul said that Rijneveld was not ‘a skinny Black girl’, as Gorman has called herself:
Deul’s criticism shows how little she knows about literature
‘(It is) an incomprehensible choice, in my view and that of many others who expressed their pain, frustration, anger and disappointment via social media…Isn’t it – to say the least – a missed opportunity to [have hired] Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for this job? They are white, nonbinary, have no experience in this field, but according to Meulenhoff are still the ‘dream translator’?’
But Deul’s criticism shows how little she knows about literature.
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