A stereoscopic reading of Rosario Ferré’s “El cuento envenenado” and “The Poisoned Story”

Rosario Ferré has been a self-translator since the mid-1980s. For just as long, criticism of her work has been snarled in essentialist arguments that assume that language embodies the values of the culture from which it derives and that words transmit an essence regardless of context. Following this logic, English and Spanish are systems in opposition. This essay compares “El cuento envenenado” (1986) to Ferré’s self-translation, “The Poisoned Story” (1991) in order to recast her as a bilingual writer. Using Marilyn Gaddis Rose’s concept of stereoscopic reading, the essay places two autonomous but interrelated texts in a theory-informed relationship that renders them as one textual space and captures the creative interliminality of a bilingual writer. This reading traces Ferré’s evolution as a writer from the late seventies to the nineties and beyond, when she envisioned a short story of greater inscrutability and resistance that reflected the legacy of colonialism within a Puerto Rican household.