Amanda Gorman’s remarkable performance of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at U.S. President Joe Biden’s inauguration touched millions. That was reason enough for a leading Dutch publisher to commission a prominent novelist to prepare a translation.
But the choice of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, an International Booker Prize-winning novelist who is white and identifies as nonbinary, provoked an immediate protest by black activists in the Netherlands. They demanded that Gorman, an African-American, be translated by a black person. Picking a white translator caused one of the protesters “pain.” Rijneveld withdrew from the project.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, in Japan, local followers of QAnon, an American far-right conspiracy theory, are adding their own zany fabulations to the shared belief that Donald Trump was robbed of his presidency. Japanese QAnon supporters are convinced that sinister foreigners are ruling Japan behind the scenes, and that the imperial family was responsible for everything from the atom bomb to the devastating earthquake of 2011. If that isn’t odd enough, one group of Japanese QAnon adherents idolizes the disgraced former U.S. Army Gen. Michael Flynn.
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