Catalan translator for Amanda Gorman poem dumped by publisher
A Catalan man hired to translate Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” has been removed from the job by the Barcelona-based publisher that first hired him.
Victor Obiols said publisher Univers dropped him from the assignment and told him that as a white man, he was “not suitable to translate it,” Agence France-Presse reported.
“They did not question my abilities,” Obiols told AFP, “but they were looking for a different profile, which had to be a woman, young, activist and preferably Black.”
Around 10 million people speak Catalan, most of them in eastern Spain and the small nation of Andorra.
Gorman, the 23-year-old National Youth Poet Laureate, was widely praised for her recitation of “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration in January.
Obiols is not the first white European person to exit as a translator of Gorman’s work. Dutch translator Marieke Lucas Rijneveld opted out of a similar assignment last week after their hiring caused uproar.
Unlike Rijneveld, however, Obiols openly criticized his departure, which came several weeks after he was contracted.
“It is a very complicated subject that cannot be treated with frivolity,” the Barcelona native told AFP. “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.”
A new translator has not been announced. Obiols told AFP that he still got paid even though his translation won’t be published.
