As an one-time American who's lived in Catalonia for many years, I'm curious to hear what people think about this:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/10/not-suitable-catalan-translator-for-amanda-gorman-poem-removed

Keeping it a thou-wow, from a European perspective, this seems like a(nother) case of Americans imposing their unique societal criteria on the rest of the world.

Perhaps these publishers have conjured up an idea of the whole of Europe based on trips to London or Paris, or maybe Amsterdam or Berlin, not realizing that whole swaths of the continent in the south and east are much poorer and, in the case of places like Spain or Portugal, do not have fully developed communities of color because they were themselves poor countries until relatively recently. The Spanish and Portuguese emigrated themselves, cooking and cleaning in France, Germany and beyond up until the 90s. Immigration in Spain from North Africa, Latin America, etc, started to develop in numbers only about 15-20 years ago, and the first generation of non-white Spaniards and Catalans is just now coming of age and finding/demanding a voice in society*.

In the east, people still emigrate in search of opportunities and, as would follow logically, those countries do not attract immigrants. I would be curious to see the publishers try to get the poem translated into Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian. What would they say after finding that there are basically no Black people in that region, much less Black female poetry translators?

Maybe then they would then ask for an activist from an oppressed minority at least, and find themselves in an ethno-religious shitshow that, based of what I've seen in the linked article, they don't really give a fuck about (Europe is London, Paris, and maybe Versailles, right? Oh, and Venice is just gorgeous! Bob and Terry went there on their second honeymoon and they said it was just so charming!)


Tl;dr: Yanqui go home


Edit to add that, yes, in Berlin or Paris, sure, you'll probably find at least one Black/POC woman translator of poetry, go ahead, great. But don't fuck with southern Europe based on your assumptions about an entire continent or your lil visit to Seville or Barcelona, not knowing our history and struggles.


*Which I think is fucking fantastic, and very healthy for Catalan/Spanish society. Here, for example, is the English-languge Instagram of a Spanish cartoonist born to Chinese parents, who provides a lot of perspective on how young people born to foreign parents feel about how the country perceives them: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8qL_qTirt_/

Also, if this is really a predominant way of thinking in the US (I honestly have no idea and am very disconnected from that white supremacist cracker circus), American fans of Gabriel García Márquez should be aware that most of his books have been translated to English by a person who is NOT of the same sex and NOT of the same ethnicity as GGM. She does it beautifully, but maybe that's beside the point?