"I, the editor of this translation…"
My friend Kalin Penev undertook to translate into Bulgarian Making a Man out of Me, an essay by Richard Blanco (President Obama’s inauguration poet), and it even turned out that there was somebody interested in publishing it. Alas, I found out that the Huffington Post has removed the original “due to the terms of the republishing agreement” so you can’t read it there.
For those of you who haven’t read the essay, it’s his story of his homophobic grandmother trying to bully him into becoming more masculine even as a little boy, and his thinking about suicide, finding refuge in writing, and still struggling to overcome the trauma from her abuse as a grown man.
I agreed to help Kalin as his editor for the translation (we work very well together like this). Neither of hoped to get this project financed, so we did it as unpaid volunteers. Then he managed to obtain permission to publish the translation from the original publisher for free. So it finally came out in a Bulgarian online newspaper last Sunday, and my name even got mentioned alongside with the translator’s. I had a moment of wild triumphant joy when I discovered that through Kalin’s post on Facebook (nobody had told me the exact date in advance)… and then I started reading the comments.
I believe my Russian audience can easily imagine what I saw there - well, a more coherent and not so obscene version of that kind of content because those individuals whose limited vocabulary consists mostly of swearwords tend to frequent other sites. There was a stream of homophobia, both the secular kind and the religious kind.
One of my Bulgarian activist friends had already jumped in and was arguing with the homophobes, switching between talking about sexual orientation from a scientific point of view and a little “theological” discussion about Sodom and Gomorrah and Leviticus with one of those oh-so-pious Christians who seem to only have read a few quotes from the Bible.
There was one more Voice of Reason, a woman who turned out to be very much “my kind,” persistently arguing with the homophobes. Most of the rest was a stream of homophobia that kept pouring out.
Then I stepped in as “the editor of this translation” - not to argue with the homophobes, but to give a little message of hope to those “invisible” readers who may need it and especially the gay teenagers. I even got six “plus” signs of approval (the homophobes just ignored me), but then my message got lost in the sea of comments. In the meantime a Bulgarian living in the US appeared to write stories about the special privileges that the gays allegedly have there and compare them to the “reverse racism” of those pesky descendants of African slaves. And of course a couple of those homophobes who write gay porn in the comments to anything gay-related to show how disgusted they are with all that gay sex that isn’t mentioned in the text appeared. My activist friend and the voice-of-reason lady united to write parodies of gay-conspiracy theories in between serious comments, and had a lot of fun with them. It was a very crazy evening.
Then, while I was typing the draft of my next (very long) comment on a Word file, the translator himself finally interfered with a comment of his own explaining how he had decided to translate this personal story because it resonated with him and asking the commenters not shift the focus to political or religious discussions. Had he read my thoughts or what? My own message was also to the effect of “let’s get back to the essay and see what’s really in it (and what isn’t, like gay sex acts)”. I recounted some of my own my own teen suicide prevention volunteering in more detail than in my first comment (not mentioning names or leaving any clues to identities, of course). I explained that gay kids learn that they like people of their own sex the same way we learn that we like people of the opposite sex before they’ve ever had sex with anybody. I even explained that it is especially difficult for such kids to find support and understanding in our country, and that’s why I’d volunteered to edit the translation of that story.
It was already past midnight when I posted that comment, but the discussion continued with fewer participants into the following day. Some moderator appeared at some point and deleted or hid some of the worst comments (I guess they don't work on Sundays).
That whole thing still brought me a positive experience: I managed to contact the voice-of-reason lady on Facebook, and she even turned out a fellow translator (who knew my friend Kalin who translated the story). My Bulgarian gay teen friend, the one who reads the comments to gay-related articles and even tries to argue with the homophobes there, was very amused because that was the way I met him too.
He was very relieved that there were no new comments to the translation on Tuesday.
For those of you who haven’t read the essay, it’s his story of his homophobic grandmother trying to bully him into becoming more masculine even as a little boy, and his thinking about suicide, finding refuge in writing, and still struggling to overcome the trauma from her abuse as a grown man.
I agreed to help Kalin as his editor for the translation (we work very well together like this). Neither of hoped to get this project financed, so we did it as unpaid volunteers. Then he managed to obtain permission to publish the translation from the original publisher for free. So it finally came out in a Bulgarian online newspaper last Sunday, and my name even got mentioned alongside with the translator’s. I had a moment of wild triumphant joy when I discovered that through Kalin’s post on Facebook (nobody had told me the exact date in advance)… and then I started reading the comments.
I believe my Russian audience can easily imagine what I saw there - well, a more coherent and not so obscene version of that kind of content because those individuals whose limited vocabulary consists mostly of swearwords tend to frequent other sites. There was a stream of homophobia, both the secular kind and the religious kind.
One of my Bulgarian activist friends had already jumped in and was arguing with the homophobes, switching between talking about sexual orientation from a scientific point of view and a little “theological” discussion about Sodom and Gomorrah and Leviticus with one of those oh-so-pious Christians who seem to only have read a few quotes from the Bible.
There was one more Voice of Reason, a woman who turned out to be very much “my kind,” persistently arguing with the homophobes. Most of the rest was a stream of homophobia that kept pouring out.
Then I stepped in as “the editor of this translation” - not to argue with the homophobes, but to give a little message of hope to those “invisible” readers who may need it and especially the gay teenagers. I even got six “plus” signs of approval (the homophobes just ignored me), but then my message got lost in the sea of comments. In the meantime a Bulgarian living in the US appeared to write stories about the special privileges that the gays allegedly have there and compare them to the “reverse racism” of those pesky descendants of African slaves. And of course a couple of those homophobes who write gay porn in the comments to anything gay-related to show how disgusted they are with all that gay sex that isn’t mentioned in the text appeared. My activist friend and the voice-of-reason lady united to write parodies of gay-conspiracy theories in between serious comments, and had a lot of fun with them. It was a very crazy evening.
Then, while I was typing the draft of my next (very long) comment on a Word file, the translator himself finally interfered with a comment of his own explaining how he had decided to translate this personal story because it resonated with him and asking the commenters not shift the focus to political or religious discussions. Had he read my thoughts or what? My own message was also to the effect of “let’s get back to the essay and see what’s really in it (and what isn’t, like gay sex acts)”. I recounted some of my own my own teen suicide prevention volunteering in more detail than in my first comment (not mentioning names or leaving any clues to identities, of course). I explained that gay kids learn that they like people of their own sex the same way we learn that we like people of the opposite sex before they’ve ever had sex with anybody. I even explained that it is especially difficult for such kids to find support and understanding in our country, and that’s why I’d volunteered to edit the translation of that story.
It was already past midnight when I posted that comment, but the discussion continued with fewer participants into the following day. Some moderator appeared at some point and deleted or hid some of the worst comments (I guess they don't work on Sundays).
That whole thing still brought me a positive experience: I managed to contact the voice-of-reason lady on Facebook, and she even turned out a fellow translator (who knew my friend Kalin who translated the story). My Bulgarian gay teen friend, the one who reads the comments to gay-related articles and even tries to argue with the homophobes there, was very amused because that was the way I met him too.
He was very relieved that there were no new comments to the translation on Tuesday.