A new kind of lost in translation
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Notable & Quotable: Lost in Woke Translation
‘Then a black Dutch fashion blogger wrote an article saying that Gorman’s work should only be translated by a black woman.’
Dec. 2, 2025
If we adhered to such a standard for choosing translators, where would it lead?
When the young black poet Amanda Gorman became an international success after reading her poem “The Hill We Climb” at Biden’s inauguration, seventeen publishers quickly bought the rights. To translate it into Dutch, Gorman suggested a white, nonbinary Dutch writer whose International Booker Prize-winning work she admired—the right kind of reason for choosing a translator. Then a black Dutch fashion blogger wrote an article saying that Gorman’s work should only be translated by a black woman. The white writer withdrew, but the story reverberated across the continent. A Catalan translation had already been completed and paid for, but since the translator was a white man, a new one was hired. A black rapper was found to translate the poem into Swedish, but because of a shortage of black translators, Denmark hired a brown woman who wears a hijab. The German publisher found a very German solution and hired an entire committee of female translators: a black, a brown, and a white one.
Appeared in the December 3, 2025, print edition as 'Notable & Quotable: Wokeness'.
From “Where Wokeness Went Wrong” by Susan Neiman in the Dec. 4 issue of the New York Review of Books
Conversation (comments)
No comment.
Selected readings
- "A surfeit of katakana words: how do you say 'woke' in Japanese?" (4/2/25)
- "The difference between deformation and devoidness" (9/5/20) — see the comment by Tim Saylor and the reply by VHM
- "The plagiarism circus" (1/6/24) — in the comments
- "Dying minority languages in Europe" (12/2/25) — note that a Catalan translation of Gorman's poem had been made
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
Julia said,
December 3, 2025 @ 10:14 am
gads
(does anyone say that anymore?)
Philip Taylor said,
December 3, 2025 @ 10:47 am
Or "sigh …", which I find trips quite readily off my tongue …
Frans de Jonge said,
December 3, 2025 @ 12:14 pm
The way it was told in Dutch media, it was the publisher who proposed the famous author (Rijneveld) and Gorman agreed. I'm not sure the distinction matters too much since the story is the ridiculous reaction afterwards, but I'm not sure if I'm necessarily onboard with that being the right kind of reason.
wgj said,
December 3, 2025 @ 7:12 pm
We shall insist that a text written in the fifth century BCE only be translated by a person from that time – after all, how can a person living millennia later understand the perspective and experience of the author?
Carlana said,
December 3, 2025 @ 9:07 pm
The poem was quite bad, so not translating it is a case of right outcome, wrong method.
Just analytically, the poem is poor. The title suggests the central metaphor is a hill being climbed but then the actual poem is all over the place. I love spoken word poetry, but The Hill We Climb wasn’t good spoken word poetry.
Philo said,
December 4, 2025 @ 2:47 am
The hill they climb is to the City upon a Hill, which, if you're not American, is probably not a familiar metaphor. But it does indeed make sense of the poem, it's very moving, about an unfinished struggle up.
And someone who hasn't been hurt, and kept from the top of that hill, probably won't translate it at all well.
The publishers seem to have understood the problem and solution: Get less old white men to do translations of not-old white men, and really of things in general. If you complain about "woke", you are the problem we should be awake to.
ardj said,
December 4, 2025 @ 4:52 am
@Julia
I cannot see "Gads" in Merriam Webster on-line or the OED (2nd ed) or Partridge's dictionary of slang (8th ed.)m unlike "Gad" or "Gadso", say. May I ask where you came across it ?
@Carlana: absolutely.
Philip Taylor said,
December 4, 2025 @ 5:37 am
Source: current online OED.
Yerushalmi said,
December 4, 2025 @ 6:19 am
@Philo Is it impossible that an old white man can have experienced the feeling of not having reached the top of the American hill? Particularly if they work as a translator, not the most well-paying job?
bks said,
December 4, 2025 @ 6:23 am
Are the Dutch really competent to blog about fashion?
ardj said,
December 4, 2025 @ 6:37 am
@Phillip Taylor: many thanks – I had supposed it possible, but not seen it. v.2 doesn't list the word at all. Should have remembered that v3 online does give a bare-bones definition.
(But at £100 a year my pension says no to further exploration. Though I have the impression that this is cheaper than it used to be.)
Philip Taylor said,
December 4, 2025 @ 8:59 am
You are very welcome. But I think that you may be wrong concerning the V2 edition (which is, I believe, the last to be released as a CD-ROM). Here is what my (CD-ROM version) has to say :
Philip Taylor said,
December 4, 2025 @ 9:14 am
Also to be found in the physical (1933) edition, Vol.IV (F–G), Section "G", page 5 (sadly too large to fit on my flat-bed scanner). At £175-00 for the full set (12 volumes + supplement & bibliography, a far better investment (IMHO) than £100 per annum for the current offering …
DJL said,
December 4, 2025 @ 11:26 am
Philo: thought we had left behind these unproductive and childish (not to mention simply wrongheaded) attitudes.
SlideSF said,
December 4, 2025 @ 1:14 pm
@Philo: One of humanity's greatest powers is imagination. It allows a person to see the world through other perspectives. The ability to do so, and its accuracy can vary greatly, depending on such factors as experience, knowledge of the subject, empathy, and the power of their creativity. You could certainly criticize an author or translator for the quality or verisimilitude of their work, but to assert that a whole group of people lack the ability (maybe you are even saying the right – who knows?) to put themselves imaginatively into the position of another seems to lack… imagination.
Peter Taylor said,
December 4, 2025 @ 3:51 pm
@Philo,
I'm pretty sure that the gospel of Matthew is familiar to at least some people who have never even visited the USA.
ajay said,
December 5, 2025 @ 4:54 am
And someone who hasn't been hurt, and kept from the top of that hill, probably won't translate it at all well.
The publishers seem to have understood the problem and solution: Get less old white men to do translations of not-old white men, and really of things in general.
But this is two separate arguments that do not make sense together. You can either say "a translator can only do good translations of things that reflect her own experiences" or you can say "have fewer old white men doing translations in general". If only a black woman can translate Gorman's poetry properly, we should also make sure that only old white men are allowed to translate Seamus Heaney – or indeed Homer.
Any thoughts?
ajay said,
December 5, 2025 @ 6:16 am
I'm pretty sure that the gospel of Matthew is familiar to at least some people who have never even visited the USA.
Not many, though, because the gospel was of course written in English, which is not spoken outside America. They're trying to do translations but it's proving tricky to find enough Jewish translators who grew up in first-century Palestine.
Philip Taylor said,
December 5, 2025 @ 8:45 am
"the gospel was of course written in English, which is not spoken outside America" — No, that's the American language of which you are thinking, Ajay : English is, of course, not spoken outside England, although I understand that some Scots, Irish and Welsh may have a passing familiarity with it …
ajay said,
December 5, 2025 @ 8:51 am
"Scots"? "Welsh"? You're just making up words now.
Rodger C said,
December 5, 2025 @ 10:11 am
The specifically American usage of this phrase is derived from John Winthrop's sermon on the Arbella on the way to Massachusetts in 1630:
"We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going."
As usual, the derivation ignores the meaning of the original.
Carlana said,
December 5, 2025 @ 10:40 am
"When day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We braved the belly of the beast."
This is paragraph one and she's already abandoned the metaphor of climbing a hill. Is it day or night? If it's night, how is there shade? Surely there is no shade until after the day has come. The second sentence then introduces two new metaphors and the third sentence, yet another metaphor. This is an absolute dog's breakfast.
"We've learned that quiet isn't always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn't always justice. And yet the dawn is hours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken but simply unfinished."
Now we're briefly back to darkness/dawn metaphor, but not before some other ones are tossed in haphazardly. Also a rhyme is tossed in for no reason. (Poems do not have to rhyme, of course, but in a poem that is mostly unrhymed, the rhymes serve as emphatic punctuation. Why is she punctuating "justice" and "do it"?)
"We, the successors of a country and a time, where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one."
You dreamed of being president but now you're reciting for Biden? Ignoring the self-involvement, Obama was already president twelve years prior. Being the third Black inaugural poet (Maya Angelou did it for Clinton; Elizabeth Alexander did it for Obama) is a step down from being president. And Biden is white! It's weird to make this about how the poem itself a remarkable achievement when the achievement isn't all that remarkable. You could write about Harris being the first woman/Black/Asian VP, but that's a different thing than how reciting for Biden is somehow achieving our country.
Look, I get it. This was about two weeks after Jan. 6. That sucks! It was traumatizing. Vaccines were only starting to roll out. Inaugurating Biden was a huge relief. But we can't let our trauma blind us to the fact that the poem was just awful and not up to the gravity of the occasion.
I can't force myself to go on. The poem is too bad to fisk. Please read Maya Angelou instead who actually wrote a good poem with a consistent theme: https://poets.org/poem/pulse-morning Ditto Elizabeth Alexander: https://poets.org/poem/praise-song-day
ajay said,
December 8, 2025 @ 11:29 am
Reform needed: at each inauguration the new president shall be honoured with the public recital of an Official Presidential Limerick. It shall be illegal for the Official Presidential Limerick to be translated into any other language whatsoever.
Philip Taylor said,
December 23, 2025 @ 6:09 am
Embarrasing observation : I routinely scan all recent threads to see if any new comments thereto have been published, but on seeing