Amanda Gorman brings the representation debate to the small world of book translation
One of the more unexpected twists of an unprecedented year is that the little-known business of literary translation has become a source of public controversy.
It began in mid-January with an uncontroversial choice â the selection of Amanda Gorman, a then-22-year-old Black poet, to read at Joe Bidenâs presidential inauguration. Gormanâs inaugural poem, âThe Hill We Climb,â was a rousing success, a stirring call to the unfinished business of American democracy after an attack on the U.S. Capitol. Penguin Random House snatched up the poem for publication, and foreign publishers clambered to publish it abroad, which meant enlisting translators worldwide.
Last month, two of those translators ceased work on the project. â first in the Netherlands, after criticism that a white author had been chosen to translate the work of a Black woman. Dutch translator Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, who last year became the youngest writer to win the International Booker Prize, handed back the assignment. Most recently, Catalan translator Victor Obiols was removed from the job.
âThey have told me that I am not suitable to translate it,â Obiols told the Agence France-Presse news agency March 10. âThey did not question my abilities, but they were looking for a different profile, which had to be a woman, young, activist and preferably Black.â
Some see the debate over âThe Hill We Climb,â out this month in the U.S. and expected to sell millions of copies worldwide, as an opportunity to interrogate literary diversity everywhere. Others say world literature wouldnât have spread without white translators and ask that we judge the translation, not the translator. Still others worry about the ethics of pressing U.S. notions of race on foreign readers.
Online, the usual battle lines are being drawn. Thomas Chatterton Williams, who tweets frequently about what he considers overreaction on the left, called the change in translators âan international moral panic.â Obiols recently told Spainâs ABC newspaper that he was âbanned.â He suggested that to get another contract, âI will have to look for bitumen,â a material used for blackface.
She became the national youth poet laureate at age 16; six years later, she read her poem at Joe Bidenâs and Kamala Harrisâ historic swearing-in.
(Representatives for Obiols and Gorman did not respond to interview requests; Rijneveld declined to comment.)
Such debates are uncommon in this specialized field. âThe translation world doesnât tend to have many large controversies like this,â noted Aaron Robertson, a writer, translator and editor at Spiegel & Grau. âItâs always extremely surprising for us when itâs thrust into the middle of a larger spotlight.â
Yet it makes sense at a time when so many institutions are being scrutinized. Conversations about representation and inequities in many industries, including book publishing, gathered momentum after last summerâs police brutality protests. And now the field of translation â which remains overwhelmingly white â is having its own reckoning.
The course of that reckoning is familiar: social media backlash leading to institutional reversal. Last month, after the Dutch publishing house Meulenhoff announced Rijneveld as the translator, journalist and activist Janice Deul led social media critics with an opinion piece in de Volkskrant newspaper calling the choice âincomprehensibleâ and a missed opportunity to hire someone like Gorman â âa spoken word artist, young, a woman and unapologetically Black.â
It was a Dutch author, young-adult writer Corinne Duyvis, who in 2015 coined #OwnVoices, the hashtag advocating that stories about marginalized people be written by authors who share the same identity and experiences. The idea was much debated in young-adult circles before reaching adult trade publishing with the controversy over Jeanine Cumminsâ bestseller âAmerican Dirtâ â a thriller about Mexican refugees written by a white American. Now it has reached international publishing.
âAs far as I know, American publishers have not historically used the background of the author and translator as part of their calculus when deciding who is going to work on the book,â said Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books, a nonprofit translation press. âThatâs not to say these conversations arenât valid or shouldnât be happening. And it will make more sense with certain projects than with others.â
The #OwnVoices movement brings special challenges to translation â a job that is inherently about making work accessible to audiences different from the author. Is the act of translation also an extension of a particular identity? Is the experience of a person of color in Holland analogous to that of an African American?
The national youth poet laureate read her galvanizing poem, âThe Hill We Climb,â just after Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th U.S. president.
There is also the relatively limited pool of translators; finding someone to do a job for modest pay that requires expert fluency in at least two languages can be hard enough. Adding identity further complicates the search.
Nonetheless, debates on translating works across race or identity are not new. âWhen people have to translate books from the 1920s that use very loaded terms, and you have characters that are racist or using derogatory terms, that gets to be a tricky issue,â said Post. âHow do you deal with that?â
Identity is one factor. Lawrence Schimel, an author and translator, brings up a Spanish translation of his own work by a straight man who âmade biased, wild assumptionsâ based on ignorance of gay subculture. âHe didnât know the word âleather queenâ and instead of finding out what it meant, he used âpaganosâ (pagans) because the characters were dressed in leather and engaging in âritualâ activities.â
Schimel then offered a counterexample: Another straight man, while translating a story of Schimelâs into German, called a gay sex chat line to ensure that there wasnât a gay slang term for sex he didnât know about. âThe publisher reimbursed himâ for the chat, Schimel said, âsince he had put in the legwork to do his job right.â
Post believes there are certain titles for which identity makes a difference â for instance, memoirs about motherhood or sexual assault. âHaving those translated by a generic white guy is viscerally irritating,â he said, âand isnât dissimilar from the emotions people are having in the Gorman situation.â
Fostering real diversity
The ability to find the right translator for any book depends on the depth â and diversity â of the field. According to a recent survey by the American Literary Translators Assn. (ALTA), 73% of the translator community is white, 11% is Asian, 10% is Hispanic/Latino, 4% is Middle Eastern/North African and 2% is Black.
The association has taken steps in recent years to address the industryâs lack of diversity. It has conducted outreach to historically Black colleges and other organizations to broaden the diversity of its conference attendees; created the ALTA Equity Advocates and BIPOC Caucus committees; launched the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship for an âemerging translator of color or a translator working from an underrepresented diaspora or stateless languageâ; and ensured that more people of color are included in its programming.
âA lot of people are very hopeful for the future of diversity efforts like these; Iâm still in the wait-and-see-box,â said Miki Turner, a photojournalism professor at USC and founder of the Annenberg Cross-Cultural Student Assn.
âWe had this big wave of diversity efforts in the â80s and the early â90s that worked for a while, and then they went away,â she said. âItâs just like the entertainment industry. Itâs all very cyclical. We have all these mandates of âMore minorities in movies and shows,â and they create an ensemble cast with the Black person and the Asian person, and they essentially say nothing but theyâre on-screen, and they call it diversity.â
Real diversity in the field of translation would have to run deeper than in other industries to foster true representation â to ensure that, say, a Black woman in her 20s would be available to translate poetry from English to Catalan.
Regina Brooks believes there is a lot of talent out there, if publishers know where to find it. The founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency, Brooks calls the idea that there arenât enough diverse potential translators âabsolutely ridiculous ⊠There are all sorts of things that can be done. The translation community just has to identify whatâs going to work for them.â
#PublishingPaidMe shows, in part, how arbitrary book advances are. But that guesswork isnât the problem; itâs the executives doing the guessing.
Getting your foot in the door often comes down to luck and privilege, as Robertson, the Spiegel & Grau editor, can attest. He received scholarships to an elite high school, followed by Princeton and Oxford universities. âI was learning how to navigate these exclusionary spaces. ⊠I knew what questions to ask, and I knew where to look,â he said. âBut to even be here, as a Black translator and as someone who works at a well-respected publishing house, Iâm sort of the exception to the rule.â
The debate comes down to opportunity, he added: âThe people who are asking for Black women to translate Amanda Gormanâs work, they are looking not at the unifying task of translation as pure art, but they are asking, âWhy do we turn to certain translators and not others?ââ
Itâs a valid question, but Robertson worries that it distracts from the larger task at hand â building pipelines among the publishing world and communities that donât have access to it. That could mean opening up access to universities with robust language departments and expanding opportunities for student translators, many of whom canât afford to accept unpaid internships in publishing.
In a statement released Monday, ALTA said patterns of âdiscrimination in education and publishing... make it harder for these translators to access opportunities comparable to those available to their white counterparts, not to mention that the criteria for these opportunities have historically been defined in white-centering ways.
âIt is damaging to literary translation as a profession and as a practice when persistent and pervasive inequality of access still exists for so many potential practitioners.â
Is translation appropriation?
Itâs notable that such systemic questions should arise from a situation as unusual as Gormanâs. Typically, foreign rights to a bookâs publication are âsubrights,â usually owned and sold (as in Gormanâs case) not by the American publisher but the literary agent. The international publisher then decides on the translator in consultation with the author and agent. Sometimes the writer has suggestions. Other times (as in Gormanâs case, according to Dutch publisher Meulenhoff), agents require foreign publishers to hire sensitivity readers tasked with finding biases, racism, stereotypes and misrepresentations in translations.
Major authors have some discretion, but many writers are fortunate to be translated at all. Between 550 and 650 works of fiction and poetry in translation are published in the U.S. every year, according to Post, who tracks the numbers in the Translation Database. Only roughly 80 of those books are poetry.
âAuthors have a limited amount of power in their careers,â said one publishing industry journalist, who asked to remain anonymous while discussing sensitive issues. âGormanâs fame has given her more say than most. So insisting on a translator who is young, female, an activist and if possible Black, sheâs giving herself leverage which she might never have again. ⊠Sheâs using that platform to foster or foment the values she believes in.â
The question of whether those values can or should apply to all translations is likely to be debated for a long time. Even some Black writers are wary of a translation system governed by an #OwnVoices ethos.
Alain Mabanckou, a widely translated French Congolese writer and professor at UCLA, believes that vetting a translatorâs national or ethnic origin is a form of âdiscriminationâ and âracism.â
âOne simply cannot fight against exclusion by reinventing new ways of marginalizing people,â Mabanckou said in an email, âfor this would ultimately lead to a situation whereby one could only understand or speak for people who are assumed to be like us.â

As an example, Mabanckou cites two major influences on his work, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou â translated by white women into his native French.
âWhen the only way of looking at the world is through the lens of identity politics, then we have moved into a space that is contrary to what literature is about,â he said. âLiterature is destined to liberate us, to change the way in which we see the world and to transport readers on previously uncharted adventures, to delineate the contours of a world in which fear gradually recedes into the background and the âotherâ is invited into our hearts.â
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Some writers have addressed the question of whether itâs OK to write about another group by answering that it requires careful work to do well. Schimel said the same applies to translation.
âI made a personal commitment years ago to make sure I translate at least one writer of color per year, as a way of using my privilege to try and effect change,â Schimel said. âCan people translate writers with vastly different experiences than their own? Obviously, but also with obvious variations in how good a job theyâll do, based on their arrogance and assumptions in treating the work and the amount of effort they expend to unlearn their ingrained prejudices.â
Brooks, the literary agent, is more concerned about finding translators who arenât privileged in the first place.
âNo one is saying at this point that white translators are not going to continue to get jobs or opportunities, because thatâs always going to be the case,â she said. âBut the question is: Is there room at the table for more voices? For opportunities for other voices? My point on that is that yes. Yes, there are.â
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