SOURCE: "'A Silence Between Us Like a Language': the Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek," in MELUS, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 3-20.

In the following essay, Mullen investigates the Mexican-American words, mythology, encoded messages, and cultural secrets in Cisneros's narrative.

. . . the cognitive level of language not only admits but directly requires recoding interpretation, that is, translation. Any assumption of ineffable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a contradiction in terms. But in jest, in dreams, in magic, briefly, in what one would call everyday verbal mythology, and in poetry above all . . . the question of translation becomes much more entangled and controversial . . . poetry by definition is untranslatable. . . . If we were to translate into English the traditional formula Tradutore, traditore as "the translator is a betrayer, " we would deprive the Italian rhyming epigram of all its paronomastic value. Hence a cognitive attitude would compel us to change...