Cisneros, Sandra - Harryette Mullen (essay date 1996)
Harryette Mullen (essay date 1996)
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 entire page is 6353 words long]
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