The Catalan translation of the poem by American writer Amanda Gorman, which she read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, has been turned down because Barcelona translator Victor Obiols has the wrong ‘profile’.
Having finished the translation, Obiols was told by the publisher that they had received word from the United States that he ‘was not the right person’.
Obiols is quoted by AFP as saying: ‘They told me that I am not suitable to translate it. They did not question my abilities, but they were looking for a different profile, which had to be a woman, young, activist and preferably black.’
He did not know whether the rejection came from the original publisher or from Gorman’s agent.
Obiols told AFP: ‘It is a very complicated subject that cannot be treated with frivolity. But if I cannot translate a poet because she is a woman, young, black, an American of the 21st century, neither can I translate Homer because I am not a Greek of the eighth century BC. Or could not have translated Shakespeare because I am not a 16th-century Englishman.’
Twenty-three-year-old Gorman’s poem, The Hill We Climb, was inspired by the attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters, and contains the idea that democracy ‘can never be permanently defeated’.
Gorman is the youngest poet to have recited a work at a presidential inauguration. The first such recitation was given to Robert Frost by John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Earlier this year, Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld resigned from the job of translating Gorman’s work following criticism that a black writer was not chosen.
[Image: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington D.C, United States, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99135528]