3/25 Readings - Cheryl

Who should translate Amanda Gorman’s work? That question is ricocheting around the translation industry 

This whole discourse reminds me a little of people who judge restaurants by the nationality of the chef—the chef of this Korean restaurant is Korean so it must be good! But my opinion has always been that just being from a place doesn't make you a good cook. I'm from Singapore, but it doesn't mean I can make a good chilli crab (I know because I've tried). Instead, I think you should judge the quality of a restaurant by the nationalities of its customers. If you enter a Korean restaurant and you're suddenly surrounded with Korean-speaking people, it's a good sign because people who would have had access and familiarity with the cuisine in its native context have deemed the quality of the food here to be acceptable to them. All this to say, I think it's a matter of reception and taste. I don't think being qualified to translate comes from identity at its face value. You could be from the same place as the author and not have a strong enough grasp on the target language to translate the original text well, but if we take language proficiency as a given, I can see that a translator would be more likely to understand the motivations and experiences that the work is trying to convey if they shared a similar background.That is really what I think is being triangulated when we're looking for a translator of a similar identity and I think it might be narrow-minded to insist that no one could ever truly understand an experience outside of their own very specific upbringing and culture. 

Shocked by the uproar': Amanda Gorman's white translator quits

I was surprised to hear that the uproar was in spite of the translator being Gorman's own choice. If she had decided it didn't matter that the translator wasn't a young, black woman like herself, should her opinion not count for anything? An additional thought, if we can only ever translate writers of the same background as us, does it mean that all white American translators have to wait for a white American writer to write something in a language that's not English before they can find a project they're qualified to translate? If you follow these objections to their logical conclusion we end up with something quite ridiculous. 

Amanda Gorman’s Poetry United Critics. It’s Dividing Translators

There was another point brought up here that sometimes not being able to choose a translator of a similar background is merely a matter of practicality. There won't be combinations of every possible language and identity, and in many cases the fact of knowing another language necessitates that your cultural background would be different from the authors. Would a Black person who had grown up in Greece and knew Greek fluently (if they existed) have had a comparable experience to Amanda Gorman anyway?

All the Violence It May Carry on its Back: A Conversation about Diversity and Literary Translation

It seems like there's no winning. If you learned the language as an adult, your grasp on the language and culture must not be deep enough; if you learned the language as a child, your competency must not be literary enough. I have no answers, maybe everyone should just translate everything and let one hundred prismatic flowers of translation flourish.

Something that Chloe García Roberts said during the Q&A session of her lecture has stuck with me ever since. On translation Chinese poetry compared to Spanish she said, "When I'm translating from Spanish, I ask myself if I have the right to be here and the answer is a resounding 'Yes!' but when I translate from Chinese, I'm always aware that I'm a guest in this language..." Is she not qualified to translate Chinese poetry because she's not Chinese? (Am I Chinese enough to translate Chinese poetry? But I know full well from personal experience that just because I have Chinese DNA and a Chinese face doesn't mean I know Classical Chinese)