Amanda Gorman, the young poet who brought strength and hope to Biden's inauguration
From Greta Thunberg to Amanda Gorman: the fragile girl as a symbol of nonconformity
Victor Obiols has been banned from translating into Catalan Amanda Gorman, the young poet who dazzled at Joe Biden's inauguration by reading the poem
The Hill We Climb.
Obiols, who had been contacted by the Univers publisher of the Enciclopèdia Catalana group to translate Gorman,
has been rejected by Viking Books
, the North American label that publishes the work of the emerging African-American star.
"Banned because,
despite admiring my curriculum vitae, they want a female, activist and preferably black translator,
" Obiols lamented yesterday on social networks, although he later deleted the tweets that made reference to the controversy.
"I have been the victim of a new inquisition," he
said.
Obiols, translator of Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare and director between 2004 and 2009 of the International Poetry Festival of Barcelona, was scheduled to translate
El turó que enfilem
and other poems and that these would reach bookstores on April 8 in a circulation of 5,000 copies.
Univers is already looking for someone else to translate for Gorman.
In Spanish,
The Hill We Ascend
will go on sale in a bilingual edition in Spanish translated by the also poet, translator and writer
Nuria Barrios
and with a foreword by the journalist Oprah Winfrey in Lumen.
Nuria Barrios, from Madrid, has a Ph.D. in Philosophy, a
translator into Spanish of the Irish novelist John Banville
and his heteronym Benjamin Black, and has published numerous books of poetry and a handful of novels.
His latest books are
La luz de la dínamo
(Vandalia, 2017), the Hermanos Machado Ibero-American Poetry Prize, the novel
Todo arde
(Alfaguara, 2020) and the collective book
Tsunami.
Feminist views
(Sixth Floor, 2019).
This is not the first controversy surrounding the translations of Amanda Gorman: a similar thing happened a few weeks ago
in the Netherlands
, when activist Janice Deul openly criticized the
29-year-old
writer
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
,
who was chosen to translate Gorman into Dutch.
the youngest Booker Prize winner for
The Restlessness of the Night
(Today's Topics), rather than an Afro-Dutch translator.
The controversy grew in networks to the point that Rijneveld (who considers himself a non-binary person),
overwhelmed by the situation created, declined to be in charge of the translation.
Obiols, who
had already finished the translation,
explained yesterday in Rac 1 that the American publisher had sent an email to Univers stating that his profile did not match what they were looking for.
The Catalan publisher will pay for the translation made to Obiols even if it is not published and also the new one, whose authorship is still unknown.
In the United States, Gorman's next three books are expected to reach a circulation of one million copies, given their enormous popularity.
The young poet, who just turned 23, became
one of the most visible voices of the Black Lives Matter movement
at Biden's inauguration,
which in the last year has shaken the streets and the country's politics in defense of the rights of African American citizens.
Just a few days ago, Gorman herself reported on her Twitter account that a security guard approached her when she was about to enter her home, considering her
"suspicious", which she described as discrimination.
He has also given his support in several tweets to
Meghan Markle
after the recent interview in which he accuses the British royal family of
racism.
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