Well, dear reader, it's been a while since yours has polluted the Internet with his thoughts. This is not because of any form of censorship or because this writer has died. The reason is that the world has become so bizarre in the past months that choosing a topic to rant upon has been a bit like letting a kid loose at the Hersey candy plant and telling him to only pick one candy bar. One becomes frozen with indecision.
Well, a bit of time has passed, and while the idiocy has not passed like a tropical storm, your faithful writer has become accustomed to the heaving of the seas and has finally gotten past the point of sea-sickness.
During the inauguration of of President Joseph Biden (otherwise known as Lunch-box Joe, Creepy Joe, or Grandpa Gropes) a young African-American woman (to use the current patois) read what was purported to be a poem that got the intellectual class clapping like seals begging for a sardine. Now your faithful writer admits that he has been unable to appreciate any poetry since the passing of Ogden Nash, so he is no judge of poetry but he knows when words are put together that make a bit of sense and make a statement instead of words strung together like the diary entry of the typical self-important thirteen year old girl who fancies herself the 21st century Emily Dickinson. The chattering classes thought the thing stunning and brave and forward looking. Your friend thought it banal and trite.
Be this as it may, the young woman, Amanda Gorman by name, is now the poetic toast of the town. A book of her poetry has been published to high acclaim by the chattering class. Not only has the book been published, but it is being translated into other language. Even Dutch.
And here's the grit in the gears. The originally designated Dutch translator has, after a bit of a dust up, has removed herself from translating the book of poetry. Why? you may ask. Is her English not up to snuff? Is her mastery of the Dutch language that of an uneducated potato farmer or barge pilot? Has she no experience in translating English poetry into Dutch? The answer to all these questions is no. The Dutch translator has a perfect command of the English language, as well as her native language, and she's translated English poetry to Dutch successfully in the past. The reason that she earned the ire of the politically correct/woke brigade is simply because she is a white woman translating the work of a black woman.
Apparently, among the more enlightened among us, a white woman is unable to translate the "experience" of a young black woman in the same way that a black woman living in the Netherlands is able to. The words and the plain sense of the words mean nothing. What is important in the translation is that a black woman living in the Netherlands, who has never lived the African-American experience can somehow read and interpret the writings of an African-American than a white Dutch woman can.
It's all about skin color, you see because skin color is the datum from which everything is measured. And so that contention changes everything. A translation of the New Testament, for example, into Gujarati or Swahili, Chinese or Inuit, could only be done by a Middle Easterner who speaks Aramaic. Want to see a Shakespeare play in Tokyo? It had better have been translated into Japanese by an Englishman or Englishwoman. In fact, one could argue that no white person has any business reading the works of a black person, or vice-versa, because the reader does not have the life experience of the writer. One could even go as far as to say that no person of color should listen to Bach or that any whitey-bird should listen to Scott Joplin because Bach came out of white Europe with a white European sensibility and Joplin came out of black America with a black American sensibility. In other words, there is no crossing of the cultural color barrier. It's all silly and stupid, as much of contemporary popular and intellectual culture is, and it's enough to gag a maggot.
