Standing on "The Hill we Climb"

As we have studied, and many have explored, the self is all tied up in translations. It's Foucauldian. The translator has a relationship to the work of translation, and thus a power over its discourse. The translation stands on its own as well as with the original text, so, like all the translators we have read have said, who does the translating matters. 

I was both surprised and unsurprised about the reaction to the Dutch translator chosen for "The Hill we Climb." While it is significant that Amanda Gorman chose the translator herself, it is also significant that the translator could not represent fully all the ideas the poet was expressing because of her limited experiences.

This calls into question who should be translating and why. If I can't speak to the specific experiences of a woman living under an Argentinian dictatorship in the 1970s, should I be focusing my translation project on María Elena Walsh? I don't really have an answer to that question, nor the hundreds of questions being posed about the "right" person for the most "faithful" translation. If we were to ask Gorman, she might say that the White-dominated translation field "isn’t broken, but simply unfinished," and in a similar way we might say that while a completely faithful translation is impossible, it is crucial for every individual to strive for their idea of the most faithful translation, and that might mean stepping down from the role entirely.

- Lila