German Romantics considered the act of translation to be similar to occultism, to rituals of covert ancient religions which guarded knowledge from the unconsecrated. Man’s overwhelming curiosity about other cultures has made him a life-long practitioner of the sacred ritual of translation and interpretation of ideas, facts, texts and images. Modern semiotics maintains that in communication a sender and a recipient of information use different codes, intersecting but not identical. Existence of certain universalia for all civilizations and the conventional character of cultural signs make any idea of human culture translatable to the language of another culture, any thought of one man understandable by another. Nevertheless the elements which lay beyond the borders of common memory and universal knowledge remain undecoded. This obscure, untranslatable part of message, paradoxically, provokes a wish to overcome the barriers of incomprehension and to create a dialogue. What is behind the yawning eye-sockets of Hanoi windows by Brian Ring, self-identification with Buddha of Trang Thanh Hien, play of word and image of Nguyen Nghia Cuong? What is the story of the enigmatic Amazon by Vu Dan Tan or Le Quang Ha’s unsatisfied old woman? In a work of art the untranslatable lacunas are filled in by passion, fury and the tense expression of an artist. Natasha Kraevskaia 2003