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Who can translate black literature?

In particular, who is allowed to translate Amanda Gorman, the young black poet who became world famous for her appearance at the Joe Biden swearing-in ceremony?

At least not Victor Obiols.

Among other things, he has translated Shakespeare into Catalan.

But the commission for Gorman's inauguration poem was withdrawn from him again.

The Catalan publisher has now told him that his "profile" does not fit, he told the AFP news agency.

Instead, according to Obiols, they are now looking “for someone with a different profile, a young activist, ideally black”.

The author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld had previously resigned after the journalist-activist Janice Deul in an article for the daily newspaper “De Volkskrant” and various people in the social media criticized the Dutch publisher Meulenhoff for commissioning a white man to do Gorman's translation .

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Whereby the word "criticized" is too much of an honor: You had claimed that the translation assignment to a white woman had "hurt" you.

In a completely out of joint racism debate, this is the sharpest accusation and the harshest judgment in one: the “hurt” of feelings, even the “hurt” of the feelings of “those affected”.

Uncertainty from screaming on the Internet

This assertion is of course not open to discussion because by definition it eludes the rational exchange of arguments - and disguises the fact that the alleged feelings are actually ideological and that the self-declared “affected” are mostly a handful of people who are themselves in the cultural industry Operation (or in its pre-commercial Twitter branch) compete for orders and attention.

But it works, especially since institutions of all kinds are so easily unsettled by shouting on the Internet.

However, it would be consistent if the

publishers concerned

about their

wokeness were to

regulate their customers in the future: Only people whose “profile” matches the “profile” of the authors are allowed to buy and read.

With stickers with the note: "Only for People of Color".

It is an old idea, but it would now serve a new purpose: to exclude “cultural appropriation” and at the same time to create a “safe space” in which “marginalized” authors are protected from hostility.

Even more consistent: if “white publishers” would forego the publication of black authors for reasons of profile.

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Abstruse?

Sure.

But no more abstruse than the wokeness ideology, from whose conceptual arsenal the reasons mentioned are borrowed.

And no more abstruse than the idea of ​​choosing the translator of a literary work instead of based on qualifications based on skin color or gender.

The essence of literature, and even more so of poetry, consists in transcendence, i.e. transference.

The first: The author transmits his thoughts and feelings, his experiences, convictions and fantasies in a form that others can understand: language.

Already with this act, the written and even more so the published word is separated from its author.

The larger the transferable substance, the greater the prospect of further transcendence: through space, i.e. through translation into other languages, and through time, i.e. through the survival of works over years, even centuries.

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We suffer with Werther, listen to Rodion Raskolnikov's internal conflicts or follow Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead into the barbarism of American slave society.

Perhaps we can draw conclusions for our own lives from reading it.

Or we develop empathy for people who live under different circumstances, in different countries, or who have lived at different times.

Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the Russian literary theorist Ossip Brik once remarked, would have been written even if Pushkin had never lived.

The work is not identical with its author and certainly not with its translator.

Language and being

Actually old hat.

But apparently the literary business is determined not to treat Amanda Gorman as an artist.

This is also evident in Germany, where the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house - as if it were not about contemporary American poetry, but Ugaritic cuneiform - commissioned three people to write the German-language edition: the literary translator Uda Strätling and the journalists Hadija Haruna-Oelke and Kübra Gümüsay.

A member of this "interdisciplinary and intersectionally thinking team" consisting of "equal experts" (message from Hoffmann and Campe on request from WELT), Kübra Gümüsay, published the much-acclaimed volume of essays "Language and Being" last year.

At one point she tells how beneficial and unusual it was for her not to be constantly asked about her headscarf when she was in London, as she was used to from Germany.

“Instead, I was asked what I study and what interests me, Kübra, which music and which films.

People were interested in me, not in a representative of Islam.

They were interested in me, not in their projections on me. "

Anyone who thinks that Amanda Gorman can only be translated into other languages ​​by black translators is not interested in the poet Gorman, but in her own ideological projections onto her.

There is a technical term for this way of thinking, which denies people their individuality and only sees them as representatives and carriers of identity: racism.

PS: Gorman has not yet commented on this discussion.

Of course, WELT will endeavor to provide an opinion.