I find little to disagree with here. I do not know how McWhorter identifies himself politically. But I believe his writings on this subject are important. I think that the liberal left, many of them claiming the mantle of socialism, have become obsessed with identify politics which are part of the weaponry used in the US to not only obscure but render the class question almost non existent. Identity politics is also used to control the narrative around race, or should I say color, in order to avoid discussing how white supremacy arose in colonial America and for what purpose. Only in the US, is the white Irishman considered the same race as the Englishman.
This obsession with identity politics is giving white supremacy plenty of fuel offering white workers no alternative but to confess their sins, or move rightward. I am confident that when the working class moves in to high gear, and it will, the nonsense we hear all around us will be shunted in to the background. During the red state strikes, from West Virginia to Arizona, I don't think pronoun recognition was a major demand at all. I also think the approach to racism that Professor McWhorter has criticized many times is among the most insidious and condescending forms of racism that Black folks have to deal with.
The views above are mine only and not a statement from Facts For Working People Blog. And I share this article from Professor McWhorter's blog, It Bears Mentioning.
Richard Mellor
Translating Amanda Gorman
Is experiencing white supremacy all she is? And if not, why do her translators have to be people just like her?
John McWhorter |
|
And so, a Dutch translator had the assignment of translating new American youth
poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s work withdrawn, and now a Catalan translator has
had his translation of her Inauguration poem, which he had already completed,
denied publication.
The logic is supposed to be that only someone of Gorman’s race, and optimally gender,
can effectively translate her expression into another language. But is that
true? And are we not denying Gorman and black people basic humanity in – if I
may jump the gun – pretending that it is?
After all, we all know that overall, a vast amount of translation is happening
all the time, and always has, by people quite unlike the original authors. The
Anglophone experiences Tales of Genji as rendered by someone not
Japanese. We experience the Bible through the work of people quite thoroughly
un-Mesopotamian.
Notice I didn’t mention Shakespeare translated into other languages. According
to the Critical Race Theory paradigm that informs this performative take on
translating Gorman, Shakespeare being a white man means that white translators
of his work are akin to him, while non-white ones, minted in a world where they
must always grapple with whiteness “centered,” are perfect bilinguals of a
sort.
But Murasaki Shikibu and the authors of the Bible were not “white,” and yet we
see no crime in experiencing their work mediated through whites’ translation.
And no, it isn’t that those books are from the past but that now we are walking
on into a brave new world. When the next white scholarly specialist in China
offers a translation of Confucius or even a modern Chinese work of fiction, we
will hear not a thing about “appropriation.”
Yet a Dutch or Catalan translator of Amanda Gorman cannot be white. To
highlight what a very right-now pose this is, recall that Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple has been rendered in 25 languages including Chinese, and no
one has batted an eye.
Again, some will try that even this needs to be revisited (i.e. a black
spoken-word poet daughter of African immigrants in Berlin should do a new
German translation of The Color Purple because it would sound more like
what Alice Walker, um … wrote? … felt? … is?) and that Gorman provides
us with an opportunity to start doing things the right way.
But the question is this: why is it that being black American renders one
especially untranslatable by whites?
The idea is that American blackness is a special case here. The legacy of white
racism, and manifestations of white supremacy still present, mean that the
rules are different when it comes to who should translate a black person’s
artistic statements. Our oppression at the hands of whites is something so
unique, something so all-pervasive, something so all-defining of our souls and
experience, that no white person could possibly render it in another language.
This is a fair evocation of what our modern paradigm on blackness teaches us.
Power differentials, and especially ones based on race, are all and everything,
justifying draconian alterations of basic procedure and, if necessary, even
common sense.
However, note how much this portrait diminishes, say, Gorman. To her credit,
she was not the one who suggested the Dutch translator be canned. After all,
are we really to say that this intelligent young human being’s entirety is the
degree to which she may experience white “supremacy”?
Watch out for the “Nobody said that” game. No, no one states that
experience of white supremacy is all she is, but if we insist that her poetry
can only be translated by someone who has experienced it, this means that the
experience of white supremacy is paramount in our estimation of her. Example:
we presumably don’t care if a white translator might be better at evoking other
aspects of her such as her youth, her sense of scansion – what matters most is
her oppression.
It goes further. Are black women’s experiences of white supremacy from one
nation to another identical? Consult more than one interview with black
Nigerian Chimamanda Adichie to find the answer. To assume that a black Dutch
daughter of Surinamese immigrants in Amsterdam is “black” in the same way as
Amanda Gorman, with the same experiences, background sentiments, assumptions,
etc. is dehumanizing of diversity among people of color. Not to mention
localist, parochial – although I understand the white publishers’ urge to show
that they are doing the “work” by figuring that the “supremacy” their kind
exert worldwide occasions the same plain old ache anywhere it lands.
But even more. The Catalan translator, Victor Obiols, has translated to acclaim
Oscar Wilde and yes, Shakespeare, and is not just a poet but a lyricist. He has
also translated a book about Miles Davis with his non-black self! Suppose he is
the better artist than the presumably black and young translator the publisher
taps instead? We are to assume that the translator’s blackness trumps all
questions as to artistic rank. This is a view willfully numb to the
discrimination, the sensitivity, the intelligence inherent to art and its
evaluation. That is, the art to which Gorman is devoting a career and a soul.
And all for what?
Acknowledging that racism exists.
And finally, exactly what might a white translator get wrong? Where are the
demonstrations of where a white translator of a black poet or novelist’s work
slipped? And as to those who might dredge some up in response to my asking,
what’s important is that in this controversy no one is bringing them up (at
least to prominent view) and no commentators have seemed especially likely to
have any examples on the tips of their tongues or iPhones. We are dealing in a
hypothetical.
Here’s an illustration of the peril – and emptiness – in hypotheticals like
this. Samuel L. Jackson claimed in an interview about about Get Out that
Daniel Kaluuya, as a British rather than American black man, was incapable of
accurately portraying how a black man actually feels when encountering a police
car. This was invaluable in two ways.
First, note that Jackson wants to split hairs even more than our publishers, so
that you have to be black American to “translate,” as it were, a black
American experience – despite that Brits Idris Elba and Thandie Newton do
pitch-perfect renditions of black Americanness to no complaint.
But second, note that we seek for Jackson to show just where
Kaluuya fell short – and obviously, he couldn’t. Could those disqualifying the
Dutch translator – nonbinary, for the record, and thus likely well-versed in
what it is to be “different” and even mistreated – seriously point out just how
they were going to go wrong? If Obiols ever shows us his Gorman translation,
where in it will anyone be able to say that he chose terms or rhythms or
nuances too “white”? We might also keep in mind that he is Catalonian – he has
known, in relation to Spain, certain matters having to do with subordination
and threatened otherness. But no matter.
This is how we are to process blackness according to the tenets of Critical
Race Theory. A fashionable current among its adherents is to claim that their
critics are merely misinformed churls seeking Twitter hits. But if CRT
adherents cheer this decision about Gorman’s translators, they are showing that
misinformation is not the only reason so many are devoting themselves to
reigning in CRT’s excesses. The grounds for firing these translators – and we
can be sure, others over the next few weeks – are thoroughly contestable by
thoroughly unchurlish people including ones who care naught about Twitter.
The grounds for these dismissals are a posture, handy for those with a need to
show that they understand what white supremacy is, while turning a blind eye to
their reduction of Gorman to a thin, pitiable abstraction. Onward indeed.
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