Grumbles from the Pulpit: Ideology, Translation, and Imperialism

Lost in non-translation

Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb stole the show at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration but when a renowned Dutch author was asked to translate her work there was an outcry because the translator is not black.

Critics said it was not just about skin colour but identity too. This was not simply about translation but whether Gorman's poetry could be accurately reflected, interpreted by someone of a different ethnicity, genre, and mother tongue.

(BBC News)

Good luck to anyone translating the Iliad and Odyssey, as they will clearly not be able to translate Homer's poetry - for how on earth could that be accurately reflected, interpreted by someone of a different ethnicity, genre, and mother tongue - and one might add, another time?

It seems that the world has gone mad, and common sense has been pushed out of the window of the top floor of a very high, and probably American, skyscraper.

But it makes a nonsense of any kind of translations of works of the distant past. How on earth could one translate and make any sense of the oldest work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh?

The reason why the same argument has not been applied to translations of ancient worlds is, I believe, twofold.

In the first instance, no one has thought what the logic of that position on translating Gorman's poem would be if applied universally, and hence to all works of literature, past and present. Once you think about that, you can easily see the nonsensical nature of that stance.

And secondly, Amanda Gorman is very much alive, while Homer is, of course, long dead. In other words, this attitude has less to do with ability to translate, and more to do with a particular ideology of segregation, forcing its way onto the contemporary world, who really know little or nothing about translation, but know a great deal about their own particular idée fixe.

And what is that? It is saying that people of one colour and mother tongue and culture cannot be understood by another, that there is too great a divide for any connections to be made. It likes to put up barriers, and has a pathological hatred of any notion that there can be communication across such a divide, which it sees as a vast chasm.

As someone who has followed with interest Voyager, and the plaque devised by Carl Sagan, and sent out to the stars to seek contact, so full of hope, this is opposed to all those values that I hold dear. 

 How can we hope to understand and make contact with other alien civilisations, if we put in place barriers to even attempting to translate a poem from one language to another? For surely, par excellence, those arguments stated against the renown Dutch author would apply even more to some intelligence who came from a truly alien culture?

I remember when Sagan arranged for a photo to be taken of Earth from the fast receding and distant Voyager, when it appeared as a pale blue dot. If ever there were posturings and imagined self-importance, we see them in this furore over translation:

"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

"It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

The Double Edged Sword of Imperialism

I must be getting old, and more like Victor Meldrew, because there is a particular annoyance which I come across increasingly, and it is a kind of reverse Imperialism. This is the position which not only takes British Imperialism as all bad, but also seeks to blame anyone who is white and British for what their ancestors did - and in particular the slave trade. It often goes hand in hand with a mantra which declares we are guilty of that past, or at least guilty by proxy because of our past ancestors, who were part and parcel of the British Empire.

Against that, I find the words of Nye Bevan (from "In Place of Fear"), just the remedy, and just right to put this nonsense in its place.

He is commenting on the House of Parliament, but his words could apply equally to the common person's involvement in the British Empire:

"The first thing he should bear in mind is that these were not his ancestors. His forebears had

no part in the past, the accumulated dust of which now muffles his own footfalls. His forefathers were tending sheep or ploughing the land, or serving the statesmen whose names he sees written on the walls around him, or whose portraits look down upon him in the long corridors. It is not the past of his people that extends in colourful pageantry before his eyes. They were shut out from all this; were forbidden

to take part in the dramatic scenes depicted in these frescoes."

Assuming that someone is white and hence must somehow be held responsible for the wrongdoings of the British Empire (because of their ancestry) is actually a kind of Imperialism itself, imposing its attributions upon those who, as Bevan notes, "were shut out from all this".