Some of the important advances in humanistic knowledge in the last three decades have been the result of what Diana Bellessi calls 'efforts of alterity'. As specialists in what the title refers to as the traffic in meaning, literary scholars have appropriately taken on the task of defining and conceptualizing such efforts, as well as carrying them out. One result has been a renaissance of translation studies and the use of translation as a point of departure or metaphor for analyzing intercultural interactions and transactions. This aricle is a brief reflection on the idea of cultural translation. The author begins by examining a scene from the history of the Americas, a history rich in high-contrast, high-stakes dramas of alterity. She then illuminate the scene through the work of two eminent thinkers about translation, Eliot Weinberger and Clifford Geertz, and end with some speculations about what analytic work the idea of cultural translation can and cannot do.