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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]

December 3, 2025 @ 10:08 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation, Translation

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