Edward Trimnell Books

Remember when Andrew Cuomo was “America’s governor”? It seems hard to believe now, but it’s true. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Andrew Cuomo briefly reassured us with his daily news conferences, which were superficially lucid and non-partisan.

I must admit that for a very brief span of time, I even liked him myself. This was during the Democratic nomination scrum; and I asked myself, “why aren’t the Democrats running this guy?”

But Governor Cuomo would soon reveal a different side of himself. We recently found out that he engaged in or tolerated extensive coverups about nursing home deaths during the worst months of the pandemic.

Even before that, Cuomo showed his willingness to stretch the truth. During the pandemic, Cuomo claimed that the Trump administration hadn’t sent him ventilators, when non-partisan sources (physicians and hospital administrators) acknowledged that the promised ventilators were right there, in New York.

After the 2020 election was over, Governor Cuomo suggested that New Yorkers should hold off on vaccinations. Why? Because the COVID-19 vaccine was developed under the tainted auspices of the Trump administration.

That was the point when I decided that Andrew Cuomo is a total schmuck.

Andrew Cuomo has now been accused of inappropriate sexual touching, and other forms of sexual harassment. There are multiple accusers. There is also, in at least one case, some photographic evidence.

We should be clear here. No one is accusing Governor Cuomo of outright rape, or sexual assault. When very powerful men engage in this type of behavior, their actions usually cannot be traced to the straightforward cause of an overactive libido.

I don’t mean to be crass, but if you have lots of money at your disposal, there are other ways of satisfying excess sexual urges. Just ask Andrew Cuomo’s predecessor, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer fell from grace in 2008, after it was revealed that he had spent thousands of dollars on high-end call girls.

I’m neither condemning nor condoning Spitzer’s conduct, mind you; but he seems to have been what we would colloquially call a “horndog”. Spitzer wanted lots of sex with lots of attractive women; and he was willing to spend money to get the job done.

That isn’t what Cuomo’s recent shenanigans are about. Andrew Cuomo seems to have far more in common with disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein than with his own predecessor, Eliot Spitzer.

With the money that Weinstein had, he could have easily provided himself with an all expenses paid, 24-hour-per-day orgy. Once again, I don’t mean to be crass. But that’s the way it is. Harvey Weinstein, we may safely conclude, was no garden-variety horndog. His life was no orgy, even though it could have been.

What Harvey Weinstein did was more about the exercise of power. For example, Weinstein would sometimes orchestrate situations in which unsuspecting women would be forced to watch him shower. In purely sexual terms, that is rather silly stuff. That isn’t the conduct of a man who simply isn’t getting enough sex, and wants more.

And so it goes with Andrew Cuomo. In one documented incident, the governor placed his hands around the face of a woman named Anna Ruch at a wedding. He then kissed her without permission. In his defense, Cuomo claimed that this is simply his “customary” way of greeting people. (Note to self: If I’m ever at a wedding in New York, watch out for Andrew Cuomo.)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 30 years, that isn’t the customary way of greeting people anymore…if it ever was. Especially not strangers, or people you barely know, at public events.

I began my corporate career in 1991, the same year as the Anita Hill hearings and the Tailhook scandal. Sexual harassment avoidance training was part of my new employee orientation from day one, at every post-college job I’ve ever had. The message I got, from the very beginning, was: don’t be casually sexual with people you barely know, even if that is your instinctive of way of doing things.

We could have a spirited debate about whether or not our 30-year organizational obsession with sexual harassment avoidance training has made people a bit too paranoid around each other. Asking whether or not various aspects of political correctness have gone “too far” is one of my favorite pastimes, after all.

But that’s another discussion for another day. The point is, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 30 years, you know what is expected of you in professional situations. The evidence strongly suggests that Andrew Cuomo did not meet that standard.

This is, I reemphasize, an issue of the governor’s attitudes about his personal power, not his sex drive. Andrew Cuomo felt entitled to grab a young woman’s face at a public event not because he wanted to sleep with her, but because he felt that certain rules of propriety and personal space did not apply to him.

Just like he felt, not so long ago, that he could justify spreading fear about the COVID-19 vaccine, so long as it served his political objectives.

Once again, Andrew Cuomo has demonstrated himself to be a schmuck. He would do well to resign, as so many voices at both ends of the political spectrum are now encouraging him to do.

If you tuned in to Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20th, you probably remember Amanda Gorman. She was the young poet who recited her poem, “The Hill We Climb” to a worldwide audience that day. Gorman wrote the poem especially for the inaugural event, on the theme of American unity.

Amanda Gorman is youngest poet to ever recite at a U.S. presidential inauguration. Gorman is a 22-year-old Harvard alumni. She is also one of the few living poets that the average American citizen could possibly name—or at least recognize. (Robert Frost died a few years back, in case you didn’t know.)

Amanda Gorman has recently found herself at the center of a controversy, though. Or rather, the Dutch translation of her poetry is at the center of a controversy.

The Dutch translation brouhaha

The Dutch publisher Meulenhoff has picked up the rights to translate Gorman’s poems into Dutch, and publish them in the Netherlands. The publisher became the target of a noisy leftwing Dutch activist after it selected Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld to translate Gorman’s work.

Why would anyone object to Marieke Lucas Rijneveld as a choice? Rijneveld is not exactly a knuckle-dragging neo-Nazi, if that was your first thought. And since Rijneveld is a Dutch citizen, we don’t even have to ask ourselves whom the writer/translator voted for in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, moreover, identifies as non-binary. All online sources use gender-neutral pronouns like “they” and “their” when referencing Rijneveld. One would think that Rijneveld’s selection as translator of Gorman’s work would therefore be regarded as a triumph for diversity.

But nothing is simple nowadays. One thing I didn’t mention: Amanda Gorman is black. Ideally, Gorman’s race would be little more than a footnote. But in the race-obsessed environment of 2021, race is everything, all the time, twenty-four hours a day. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, transgender or not, fashionably liberal or not, is most definitely not black. Rijneveld is blond, and as pale-skinned as most white northern Europeans tend to be.

Which brings us to the noisy Dutch activist. Janice Deul, a self-described “cultural activist” in the Netherlands, has claimed that Rijneveld, by virtue of their race, cannot properly translate the poetry of an African American woman.

Describing the selection of Rijneveld as “an incomprehensible choice,” Deul claimed that Rijneveld had “no experience” in Gorman’s identity as a “black woman”. “Why not choose a writer who—just like Gorman—is a spoken word artist, young, female, and unapologetically Black?” Deul went on.

In our current environment, no corporate entity wants to find itself on the “wrong side” of the racial narrative—whatever the “right side” of that narrative happens to be at the moment. The publisher, Meulenhoff, quickly kowtowed to the noisy activist. Rijneveld, for their part, withdrew from the project,  not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings.

What about Janice Deul, though? Deul’s parents are from Suriname, and she’s of distant African descent. Like most educated residents of northern Europe, she has a command of English. But she describes Dutch as her native and primary language. All of her social media posts are in Dutch.

This would all suggest that Deul doesn’t necessarily share the U.S.-based, English-speaking formative experiences of Amanda Gorman, any more than Marieke Lucas Rijneveld does.

Why you probably don’t speak Dutch

Herein lies the important point, where commercial translation is concerned. Dutch is a minor language in global terms, spoken by only about 24 million people worldwide. That’s a bit less than the population of Texas. By way of comparison: there are 477 million native speakers of Spanish, and 378 million native speakers of English. That makes Dutch small linguistic potatoes by any standard.

Dutch-speakers are geographically and culturally isolated, too. Most of them live in the Netherlands, or in the neighboring Flanders region of Belgium. Variants of Dutch are spoken in a few former Dutch colonies. But European Dutch is basically a European language. Dutch doesn’t have the global reach of English, Arabic, Spanish, or French.

Dutch, like English, is a Germanic language, too. English is therefore comparatively easy for Dutch-speakers to learn. Most Dutch-speakers do obligingly learn to speak English with reasonable fluency. If you’re an American or a Brit living in Amsterdam, you probably should learn Dutch, just to be polite. But the truth is—you probably won’t need to, if your only goal is to get by.

And as we all know, native English-speakers are notoriously lazy language-learners, anyway. Most Americans struggle to remember a few phrases of high school Spanish while on a trip to Mexico. Few British people I’ve met are even minimally comfortable in French, German, or Spanish, either.

So no—not many of us learn Dutch.

Native speakers and the art of commercial translation

But there’s a further complication, you see. When producing a commercial translation, the translator should be a native speaker of the target language. I read Japanese fluently. (I used to be a professional Japanese-language translator.) I can produce a high-quality Japanese-to-English translation for you. When translating a complicated, nuanced text from English to Japanese, though, my finished product is invariably going to contain little glitches and awkward phrases that a native Japanese-speaker would immediately recognize as “foreign”.

This is how it goes with any other language. The target language translation should always be performed by a native speaker. This all means that whoever ends up translating Amanda Gorman’s poetry for the Dutch marketplace, he, she, or they will almost certainly be a native Dutch-speaker, i.e. not an American. This means that he, she, or they will have a formative experience different from Amanda Gorman’s American (or, if you prefer, African American) upbringing.

The dangers of tying race to qualifications

The Amanda Gorman Dutch translation kerfuffle followed a now familiar pattern. A previously obscure, self-important activist harnessed the amplifying power of social media to fabricate a controversy surrounding the politics of identity. Corporate entities quickly yielded ground. The press reported what was happening, but didn’t challenge any of the activist’s underlying premises. The activist got their way.

We’ve reached a point in Western civilization where no absurdity will be challenged, if it is only uttered in the name of racial justice or diversity. But genuine diversity will not be served by kowtowing to self-serving demagogues like Janice Deul.

To declare that only a black European translator may render the work of a black American author into Dutch is to suggest that race—regardless of native language, background, or formative experience—is the primary determinant of identity. In literary terms, the result is to create a permanent separation between the work of black authors and everyone else.

This places black authors permanently outside the mainstream, which will limit their market reach. If work by a black author is so abstruse and tied to race that only a black writer can translate it, then it is so abstruse and tied to race that only a black reader really has any business reading it, either.

This ghettoizes the work of black authors—not just in the bookstores, but also in the minds of readers in a crowded literary marketplace.

This also creates a dangerous precedent that can be exploited by racists and bigots of any background. Once you accept the basic idea of tying race to professional qualifications, you have opened a Pandora’s box that you cannot simply open and close at will. If we accept the premise that only black translators may handle the work of black writers, then it is not a far jump to the notion that only people with Teutonic ancestry should be teaching high school German.

As someone once said, “You don’t want to go there”. And we shouldn’t go there. No one was served by this latest capitulation to the social justice mob—least of all black authors who would like to find a wider readership.