Ella Whelan at The Telegraph argues that Janice Deul’s complaint that the original choice of translator for Amanda Gorman’s poetry amounts to a sin against literature as well as ride roughshod over the poet’s own judgment:
Deul claimed that her concern wasn’t just Rijneveld’s skin colour, but the Booker-winner’s lack of experience in spoken-word poetry – even as she argued that the main feature of Gorman’s poetry was that “her work and life are coloured by her experiences and identity as a black woman”. Rather than asking whether Rijneveld or Obiols or any translator could accurately capture Gorman’s voice, style and feeling in another language, the main concern seemed to be whether or not the translator looked like the original writer.