"Translation" from Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy, translated by Jennifer Croft

“Translation”, from Dislocations

by Sylvia Molloy

June, 2022

Almost every day, the narrator visits M.L., a close friend who is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Based on these encounters and M.L.’s fragments of memory, she constructs a powerfully moving tale about the breakdown of a mind that progressively erases everything in a very peculiar way.

An attempt through writing to “make a relationship endure despite the ruin, to hold up even if only a few words remain.” “How does someone who can’t remember say ‘I’?” asks the narrator, considering this woman who shows her around the house as if she were visiting for the first time, or who is unable to say she feels dizzy, yet is perfectly capable of translating into English a message saying that she feels dizzy.

Passages from a shared past and present that are transformed into fiction when faced with a forgetting that can no longer refute them. A book that opposes disintegration with a precise and vital prose and the unique sensibility of one of Latin America’s greatest storytellers.

Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy, translated by Jennifer Croft, will be published by Charco Press in October 2022.

Translation

Like rhetoric, the faculty for translation does not get lost, at least not until the very end. This I confirmed once more today as I spoke with L. I asked her if the doctor had been informed that M.L. had had a dizzy spell, and she told me he had. Out of curiosity, I asked her how she had conveyed this information, given that L. doesn’t speak English. M.L. interpreted for me, she said. Which means that while M.L. is incapable of saying that she has had a dizzy spell, that is, incapable of remembering the state of being dizzy, she is capable all the same of translating into English L.’s message that she, M.L., has had a dizzy spell. It is a way of accessing a momentary identity, a momentary existence, by means of that efficiently transmitted (transmuted) speech. For a second, in that translation, M.L. is there.

Translated by Jennifer Croft

Photo by Agustín Fernández, Unsplash.

Sylvia Molloy

Sylvia Molloy (Buenos Aires, 1938) is a novelist, essayist, and a leading literary critic of Latin American literature. She is Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities Emerita at New York University, where she taught Latin American and comparative literatures. In 2007, at New York University, she created the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish, which was the first program of its kind in the United States. She is the author of two novels: En común olvido (2002) and En breve cárcel (1981), and has written several books of short prose pieces including: Varia imaginación (2003), Citas de lectura (2017), Vivir entre lenguas (2016) and Dislocations, originally entitled Desarticulaciones (2010). Her critical work includes At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (1991), and Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998). She has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She lives in New York and Dislocations is her first book of fiction to appear in English.

Jennifer Croft

Jennifer Croft is the author of Homesick and Serpientes y escaleras and the co-winner with Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk of the International Booker Prize for the novel Flights. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review Daily, The Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, Tin House, BOMB, n+1, Guernica, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. For Charco Press, she has translated Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery (2021) and Sylvia Molloy’s Dismantling (forthcoming 2022).