And now the field of translation - which remains overwhelmingly white - is having its own reckoning. Conversations about representation and inequities in many industries, including book publishing, gathered momentum after last summer’s police brutality protests. Yet it makes sense at a time when so many institutions are being scrutinized. “It’s always extremely surprising for us when it’s thrust into the middle of a larger spotlight.” “The translation world doesn’t tend to have many large controversies like this,” noted Aaron Robertson, a writer, translator and editor at Spiegel & Grau. Such debates are uncommon in this specialized field.
(Representatives for Obiols and Gorman did not respond to interview requests Rijneveld declined to comment.) “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.” “They have told me that I am not suitable to translate it,” Obiols told the Agence France-Presse news agency March 10. Most recently, Catalan translator Victor Obiols was removed from the job. Dutch translator Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, who last year became the youngest writer to win the International Booker Prize, handed back the assignment. first in the Netherlands, after criticism that a white author had been chosen to translate the work of a Black woman. Last month, two of those translators ceased work on the project.
Penguin Random House snatched up the poem for publication, and foreign publishers clambered to publish it abroad, which meant enlisting translators worldwide. Gorman’s inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” was a rousing success, a stirring call to the unfinished business of American democracy after an attack on the U.S.
It began in mid-January with an uncontroversial choice - the selection of Amanda Gorman, a then-22-year-old Black poet, to read at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. One of the more unexpected twists of an unprecedented year is that the little-known business of literary translation has become a source of public controversy.
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