About the Amanda Gorman debacle — Maria Antonia Blandon

 I had heard about this case many years ago; someone brought it up to the research group in translation I attended during my undergraduate studies, as a discussion prompt with a controversial, or ‘spicy’ intention behind it. In this group, we were all translators with diverse backgrounds; some had been published already and worked as full-time translators, some had just started their education as translators, and others just wanted to share their passion for translation. But the main characteristic that united us was our skin color: we were all white. I remember that none of us really understood what the problem was, whether it made a difference that the translator was white, black, non-binary, Hispanic, native, and so on, because we considered that what made a translator stand out was merit (publications, awards, overall presence in the field). Under that logic, we all agreed that choosing Rijneveld was in order due to their work which had been awarded the International Booker Prize; if anything, that could be a reassurance of their poetic capability, making them suitable to take on the challenge of translating Gorman’s poetry. 

Now I can take a step back, since time has passed and I’ve been exposed to other contexts aside from white Latin American scholarship, and recognize that the discussion was grounded on the very problem in the center of all translation discourse: who is the translator? It wasn’t as much about who can translate, because that would be a fruitless discussion since we can agree on the ethical limitations behind it, but about the person who can support the choices made in the translation. A fitting example was the Spanish translation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as quoted in the Bhanoo article, since what was being questioned was not the requirements to translate that novel, but the choices made in the translation: can ‘sirviente’ work for ‘slave’ given the different denotative notions and connotative uses? How can the dialogue by African-American characters that Morrison carefully writes in so a reader can recognize them be reconstructed into Spanish? The problem lies in the understanding of the work by a translator, who has the task of isolating the most crucial poetic instances that identify the work, and making sure they can also be recognized in the resulting translation. It’s also a question of knowing yourself, your abilities, your strategies, your work ethic as a translator, if reconstructing these instances prove to be such a difficult task that goes beyond your practice, then you might have to consider giving up so you can give others a chance to succeed in what you could possibly have failed. I think that’s the reason why Rijneveld stepped down and also chose to not say anything about it, apart from the public pressure that painted them as inefficient. They understood that Gorman’s project was proving to be more complex than what they thought, so best to give others a chance at what they understand this work is.