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Is American Dirt, "Trauma Porn?"

Bucky

Bucky

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The new novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, officially released on Tuesday, was anointed the biggest book of the season well before it came out.

All of these negative reviews centered on one major problem: American Dirt is a book about Mexican migrants, and author Jeanine Cummins has identified as white, calling her family mostly white “in every practical way” a few years ago. (She has since begun to discuss a Puerto Rican grandmother.) Cummins had written a story that was not hers — and, according to many readers of color, she didn’t do a very good job of it. In fact, she seemed to fetishize the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings.

The story of American Dirt has now become a story about cultural appropriation, and about why publishing as an industry chose this particular tale of Mexican migration to champion. And it revolves around a question that has become fundamental to the way we talk about storytelling today: Who is allowed to tell whose stories?
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Why American Dirt, a novel about Mexican immigration, sparked such a controversy - Vox

Interesting storyline here. I definitely think it is possible for an outsider to translate a foreign culture. Those that do, like Jeanine Cummins have to understand that many will view her translation of a Mexican migrants experience as appropriation. She definitely has a right to tell the story.
 
Of course someone can write about a culture they don't belong to. Its called creativity.

Steven Kung hasn't ACTUALLY been haunted by real monsters all his life.

George RR Martin did not, in fact, grow up at a Mideval Times, or a Renn Fair.

CS Lewis didn't personally know any centaurs.
 
The Italians have it as "traduttore, traditore". [Ed.: If you prefer Hungarian, it's "fordítás: ferdítés".] Or in English, "Translator, traitor".

The bane of translators from one language to another is the 'feel' -- the nuances -- of the words and of the language itself. They do their best but cannot capture the whole. An example of this can be found at: Project MUSE - Four Translations of Dante's <i>Inferno</i>
 
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