Our shared humanity lost in translation

Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman speaks at the inauguration of US President Joe Biden. Picture: Getty Images

Nothing would be easier than to dismiss the controversy about who can, and who cannot, translate Amanda Gorman’s poem The Hill We Climb — which Gorman read out at Joe Biden’s inauguration — as a storm in a teacup.

But no matter how muted the voice of poetry may be in the increasingly fractious conversation of mankind, her publishers’ decision, apparently with the young poet’s consent, to withdraw the commissions initially issued to translators who are not “women of colour” does more than speak to the crisis in Western culture: it shouts.

In effect, our culture has always rested on twin pillars: the ­ineradicable fact of human diversity; and the equally ineradicable fact of human commonality, which binds diversity into what used to be referred to as “the ­family of man”.

The Bible itself places that ­duality at the heart of Western thought. The “whole world branched out”, it says, from the single seed of the “sons of Noah”; but in the providence which combined the beauties of infinite difference with those of underlying similarity, mankind “filled the earth” in “clans and nations”, “each with its language”.

The combination of unity and diversity may be, as Saint Augustine suggested, a marvel which “no one could fail to see”; it is, however, only liveable thanks to another priceless gift — that of translation.

No ability attests as fully to our shared humanity as the capacity to meaningfully render in any one language the outstanding literary works of any other. And by transporting us to distant, otherwise ­inaccessible worlds of creative ­genius, the linguistic finesse of the best translations fuses those worlds into a single heritage, as open to the most marginal languages as to the most widespread.

Little wonder then that the human capacity to translate has so often been regarded as brimming with spiritual significance.

“Translation,” wrote Gershom Scholem, the pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism, to Franz ­Rosenzweig, who was translating the Hebrew Bible into German, “is one of the greatest miracles, leading into the heart of the sacred ­orders from which it springs.” It is not just that, the eminent theologian replied; “all life beyond one’s own soul relies upon this possibility”, without which ­humanity would fragment into uncomprehending shards.

Nor is it surprising that translation has been most highly prized in the periods that put the greatest value on building bridges across centuries and between cultures: in the Renaissance, for example, when the Humanists celebrated the practice, until then scorned, of translating into the vernacular the masterpieces of antiquity; and during the Enlightenment, when Goethe, one of European thought’s towering figures, placed upon the untrammelled development of translation his hopes for a genuine “world literature”.

The spectacular increase in literary translation which characterised the postwar period was therefore a blessing, and nowhere more so than in poetry — whose intrinsic complexity challenges the foreign reader and translator alike.

There were, no doubt, myriad factors that encouraged many of the postwar’s finest writers to translate works by poets whose ethnicity and background was far removed from their own; but it would be wrong to ignore the impact of an intellectual climate that stressed openness to the world.

Recoiling from the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, the West’s leading theologians — in the last great era in which religious thought weighed heavily in public life — paid unprecedented attention to the question “What is man?”. In books that proved unlikely bestsellers, thinkers as influential as Martin Buber in the Jewish tradition, Reinhold Niebuhr in the Protestant, and Jacques Maritain in the Catholic, emphasised the fundamental role, in defining the essence of the human person, of our capacity to understand each other across the boundaries of race, creed and language.

Unfortunately, that ethos, which made “the family of man” its central preoccupation, rapidly waned as memories of the horrors faded and faith became increasingly peripheral.

Yes, Martin Luther King, a disciple of Niebuhr’s, ceaselessly reminded Americans that “There are no gradations in the image of God: every man from treble white to bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God.”

But it was Malcolm X who captured the emerging spirit of the times when he proclaimed “the white man” as “the common enemy” of all oppressed peoples, and set the goal of “the end of White-ism, the end of the white man’s unjust rule”. Never willingly left behind, the bellwethers of “radical chic” piled in, with Susan Sontag portentously declaring that “Humanity is not one”, while the French philosopher Michel Foucault — who derided the theologians’ humanism as sentimental waffle — welcomed a future in which the very idea of “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”.

Thus began the death throes of the unity of mankind — among the “progressives” who were once its loudest champions; and as it died, so did the conviction that what matters in literary translation is not the colour of one’s skin but the calibre of one’s mind.

Translation has, to be sure, been in the line of fire before: in early modern Europe one of the word’s meanings was “death” — to be “translated” from this world to the next — making it all the more poignant that the great William Tyndale, to whom we owe the term “scapegoat”, was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 for translating the Bible into English.

He was to be followed in meeting a grim fate by many others, including Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, who was stabbed to death in his Tokyo office.

What is different this time, however, is the reaction, or lack of it: the silence from the White House, which had made Gorman a celebrity; the spinelessness of the publishers; and the contrition of the first translator affected, the Dutch Booker Prize winner Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, who apologised for having imagined that a white person could ever truly ­penetrate the writing of a “woman of colour”.

Many years ago, Gilbert Murray — the outstanding Australian-born translator of Greek and Latin verse — ascribed the collapse of Roman civilisation to a “failure of nerve” in the face of mounting threats.

Now, with a new form of racism preparing to crush all opposition, our own “failure of nerve” is returning to haunt us. For if translation is to be segregated on racial grounds, or according to the other markers of identity, how can ­humanity’s common cultural inheritance survive? And once it is lost, what remains?