Reading this week’s articles, I felt very sad for the translation community and for Amanda Gorman. The NYT article ended in a good place in pointing out that the debate over who should translate Gorman seemed to overshadow Gorman’s message of bringing people together. I thought the approach the German publisher took in assembling a team that worked closely with the author sounded effective and appealing. I was confused by some of the mixed messaging between the articles—in the Guardian article it’s reported (by the publisher) that Gorman selected Rijneveld as a translator herself. I tried to search for Gorman’s response to this controversy and couldn’t find anything. I was interested in how Bhanoo in the Washington Post article delved into the hyper-specific of identity matching via Junot Díaz’s wish list for his ideal translator for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It reminded me a lot of the politics within psychotherapy, and in recent years a perseverance on “matching” identities between therapist and client (as if anyone has an uncomplicated relationship with their identity, as if any single person can truly understand another single person). It made me grateful for the solace offered in Leeder’s talk on Friday about prismatic translation, which, as I understood it, allows for multiple truths and understandings, and a hope that we are all doing our best and approaching this work tenderly and with good intent. The article by Patel and Youssef was illuminating and oddly comforting (it reminded me a lot of experiences I’ve had in the field of psychotherapy, and it’s nice to know that my profession is not the only one with these types of issues).
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