European Publishers Agonise Over Profile Of Amanda Gorman Translators

Poet Amanda Gorman made her name with a call for unity within the United States, but the job of translating her work in Europe has sparked divisive debate

Paris (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 2nd Apr, 2021 ) :Poet Amanda Gorman made her name with a call for unity within the United States, but the job of translating her work in Europe has sparked divisive debate.

"To put our future first, we must first put our differences aside," the 23-year-old recited in her now-iconic performance at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration in January.

But in Europe, it has been hard to ignore people's differences when it comes to translating that poem, "The Hill We Climb".

The furore was kickstarted in the Netherlands when activist-journalist Janice Deul said it was "incomprehensible" that a person with white skin, poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, had been chosen for the job.

Rijneveld, "shocked" at the uproar, quit the project, and publishing house Meulenhoff apologised, saying it had "missed an enormous opportunity to give a young black woman a podium".

However, this went down very badly with Gorman's Spanish translator, Nuria Barrios, who said Deul's victory was "catastrophic".

"It's the victory of identitarian discourse over creative freedom," she wrote in the daily El Pais on March 11.

As temperatures rose on Spanish Twitter, Gorman's Catalan publishers Univers took a second look at their own choice of translator, Victor Obiols, concluded he was not even the right gender, and sacked him.

"They told me that I am not suitable to translate it," he 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."