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 essay below, Mullen discusses Cisneros's representation of the conflict of Hispanic and Anglo cultures and their respective linguistic codes in terms of Latino tensions between race, class, gender, and ideology.

… 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...