I’ve subscribed and canceled my subscription to the New York Review of Books in an endless cycle of violence. I am currently in the truce or cancelation phase of the cycle, so I missed Susan Neiman’s NYRB review of David Rieff’s Desire and Fate. I am accordingly grateful that the Wall Street Journal excerpted Neiman’s review in its December 3 Notable and Quotable: Wokeness squib:
When the young black poet Amanda Gorman became an international success after reading her poem “The Hill We Climb” at Biden’s inauguration, seventeen publishers quickly bought the rights. To translate it into Dutch, Gorman suggested a white, nonbinary Dutch writer whose International Booker Prize-winning work she admired—the right kind of reason for choosing a translator. Then a black Dutch fashion blogger wrote an article saying that Gorman’s work should only be translated by a black woman. The white writer withdrew, but the story reverberated across the continent. A Catalan translation had already been completed and paid for, but since the translator was a white man, a new one was hired. A black rapper was found to translate the poem into Swedish, but because of a shortage of black translators, Denmark hired a brown woman who wears a hijab. The German publisher found a very German solution and hired an entire committee of female translators: a black, a brown, and a white one.
Both Neiman and Rieff are creatures of the left, but I found Rieff to be an engaging correspondent in ages past. It is a pleasure to be reminded of his work in connection with his new book.
