me" 119). This is thevoice of the experienced writer who simultaneously eSpanish and English, for while the heart still may beat inthe words emerge e

Julia Alvarez, coming to terms with words has meant comterms with her bilingual and bicultural identity, that is,world. "Bilingual Sestina" acknowledges the journey fother side of language and culture an

ring closed." The spediment and of lack of communication, both physicaconveyed in these images reverberates throughout thepoet discloses that things "aren't getting said" in Englthere are words and nombres she "can't translate" fHer linguistic exhaustion climaxes with the insisterepeated negative "no" that connects the final two sexa[...................................] no Englishyet in my head to confuse me with translations, nodoubling the world with synonyms, no dizzying arr(emphasis added)By equating English with a "dizzying array of wfounds with "translations" and "synonyms," thspeaker unequivocally identifies Spanish as her lanat that point in time. Simultaneously, however, Athis lack of expression is not exclusively the resultlanguage and gaining a second: "Even Spanish /then when we saw how frail a word is / when faceit names." Spanish and English can be equally imfamily home in the Dominican Republic, "palabrasEnglish / stand dusty and awkward in neglectmaterialization of language in this image reaffirmbetween word and world in Alvarez's estimation.

). In "Bilingual Sestina," the end-word "nombres"nominal and verbal variants in English and Spanish (""name," "nombre," and "numbering") appear a total of tenAdditionally, Alvarez enumerates names of things andfrom her past as she considers how those names (and tthey summon) bear upon the process of writing poetrpres

[s] the sun." Sureinforce Alvarez's belief in the power of words to inworld.

CATHARINE E. WALLSecond, the words sometimes recur as lexical variants rathverbatim. Thus, "said" changes into "say" and "saying";into "word is" and "world." Third, within the bilingualSpanish and its translation back into English offer an aresolution to the problem of lexical variants. The transform"nombre(s)" into "numbering" and "names" is a notableof how the author's bilingualism influences the compositipoem. And while "names," of course, is a direct trans"nombres," its reconfiguration as "numbering" in the fifindicates the complex linguistic associations between Spannoun nombre[s] and the verb nombrar) and English (nnumber). Finally, the end-words "English" and "Spanishinvariable throughout the sexains until the last line of thwhen "English" is transposed into its Spanish equivalent, "This rhetorical tour de force is further testament to Asingular purpose in "Bilingual

ut her place in American literature and the asser-tion in the poem that she is unable to express herself adequately"en ingles.

"caught between languages and cultures" (

Bilingual Sestina" is emblem-atic of the bilingual writer's search for expression while livingbetween two languages and cultures.

native tongue. I wasinto, not writing in, English. ("Writin

(1998). Indeed, much of what shdeclare concerns language

any times, when writing, I was surprised tohear myself speaking in Spanish while my fingers were typing thesame sentence in English. Then I would get tongue-tied and lose thesense of what I was saying and writing, as if observing that I wastranslating from one language to the other had made me lose both ofthem