For the Love of Reading
Introduction
I was prompted to make the pot by a very obscure moment, significant at the time and probably for a long time for those concerned but, as a social story, in these volatile times, it passed into forgotten space quite quickly.
Translating Poetry
Joe Biden's inauguration, 2021, a young black American woman, the poet Amanda Gorman, was commissioned to write a poem to celebrate. As a result, her popularity soared and her work was translated into many languages, one of which was Dutch.
The Translator
A young white Dutch woman writer, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was commissioned to translate. Rijneveld is a Booker Prize winnning novelist who calls herself 'non-binary' with 'they/them' pronouns. These were both young women, very much of their time. The obsession with identity that defined literature at the time - and still does - was the water in which they both swam. They had much in common but not enough according to some.
Objection!
Janice Deul, a black Dutch fashion and culture journalist and activist and a 'DEI professional.' She declared Rijneveld unsuitable because she was white and there were black translators who could do the job better. A white non-binary person 'wouldn't get the references.' The publishing company caved in and Rijneveld herself chose to walk away from the project. It is still unclear if Gorman's work
has been translated into Dutch or not. I also note that a similar fracas occurred over translating Gorman's work into Spanish, German, and Hungarian.
What about the Art?
Very tellingly, there seems to be little discussion in the mainstream press about the suitability of spoken word poetry on the page which one might think the more obvious potential problem. Poet Jenny Lindsay has talked about lengthy debates among Scottish poets about the problems of this. This would also be the debate that relates to the art itself not just the social formulae that surround it. It is, I suspect, easier to talk socio-political issues than it is to debate the knottier matters of art forms though so I do not expect change in area any time soon.
Back the Pot
What struck me about the whole sorry saga, though, was that a closeness seemed to have grown between the poet, Gorman, and Rijneveld, her translator. A new transatlantic friendship between two young writers was apparently disregarded in favour of formulaic identity politics. I tried to imagine them, decades later, meeting somewhere and musing: 'how on earth did we let that happen?!' This imaginary scene is what led to, 'For the Love of Reading.'
It is so much easier for large companies to push young people around than older people. The young are far more at risk. They have their entire careers ahead of them. Older writers are more likely to have a track record to speak for them so they tend to have more resilience to this kind of bullying. As to the publishers themselves,
cancelling writers, especially poets, is very low risk because poetry is thin pickings anyway as far as profit is concerned.
The Context
This issue disappeared quickly and few people remember it now. It was a classic moment of the early 20s - the COVID 20s. Everything amplified online. The racialisation of everything. Publishing of writing as a social formula not an artform.
So here is, 'For the Love of Reading,' to which I could add, and the intimate nature of translation. I live my life in translation every day now so I am particularly attached to this story.
There is an interesting piece in the Guardian by Kenan Malik about this story. He discusses some of the history of identity politics for Black American writers and the publishing industry's reluctance to employ black translators. He is crystal clear that Rijneveld being white was not the problem. She was, after all, Gorman's own choice.
For the Love of Reading
I made For the Love of Reading in 2021 during one of the countless lockdowns of the COVID years. It was a contemporaneous chronicle as well as hymn of praise for reading books - paper books, not on a screen. It was also the time when my own love of very long novels really took hold. The blonde figure reading in the garden is me. The figure in the circular gold frame is 'Erato' the Muse of Poetry, by Maud Sulter, (1960-2008,) a photographic work from the Zabat series, 1989, that I have in my living room. Maud was a poet, artist, curator, and writer about art. What is less known is that, towards the end of her life, she qualified as a translator, mainly of poetry, particularly Baudelaire, from French to English.
