Abstract
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.