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Writing is a performative act. The author adopts a persona, a narrative voice, a lens through which they observe and interpret a work, much like an actor assuming a character. In a translation, the translator becomes an added element of the performance. Perhaps now, the author steps behind the curtain as the translator performs the script, respectively playing the roles of playwright and actor. Or maybe the author directs and acts alongside the translator, both inhabiting characters on the stage.<\/span><\/p>\nThis is a familiar metaphor\u2014one of the many translators may deploy when trying to convey what it is we do\u2014though it becomes more complicated when author and translator are one and the same. In this case, where does the performance end? What of mediation and interpretation? What happens to the concept of the original? Is it the same writer if she\u2019s writing in two different languages? Sylvia Molloy\u2019s book <\/span>Crossings <\/span><\/i>(Seagull Books, 2025), edited by Diana Taylor and composed of two independent fiction pieces, probes the boundaries of these questions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Crossings<\/span><\/i> unites two works of short fiction written by Molloy in Spanish. The first, <\/span>Varied Imagination<\/span><\/i> (2003), features brief vignettes recounted by a first-person narrator (presumably Molloy herself) who relates memories of travel, family, language, and loss in sometimes witty, sometimes heartbreaking ways. The second, <\/span>Living between Languages<\/span><\/i> (2016), consists of mostly paragraph-length reflections on Molloy\u2019s existence in and among multiple languages. Born in Argentina to an Irish father and French mother, Molloy was immersed in English and Spanish when she was young, and though her grandparents declined to speak French to their daughter, Molloy was determined to learn it and make up for her mother\u2019s \u201cpoverty\u201d of \u201cmonolingualism.\u201d Language was bound up with power and political dynamics, and Molloy includes phrases in English, French, and Spanish without feeling the need to translate them for her reader, whatever their language may be.<\/span><\/p>\n In her foreword, Diana Taylor writes of Molloy\u2019s shifts between languages and the attendant sites of each, her experience of \u201cshuttling back, forth, and between\u201d them all, aware constantly of how each summons \u201ca different self\u201d and \u201can altered path to memory.\u201d This sensation of inhabiting multiple identities and places through the past and present is recognizable to Molloy\u2019s readers. Most of her work traverses this thematic territory with her characteristic incisive observations and deep considerations conveyed by deceptively simple prose. Memory and language mediate <\/span>Crossings<\/span><\/i>\u2019 explorations of identity and home, with <\/span>Varied Imagination <\/span><\/i>walking through incomplete, or deliberately obfuscated, memories of Molloy\u2019s past, and <\/span>Living between Languages <\/span><\/i>revealing the conditions and environment out of which her writing, and written self, emerge. But which self is she allowing the reader to see, and does that self change from the Spanish to the English?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe linguistic performances of the two versions of the text are the same though not identical, like twin globes tilted along different axes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Taylor claims that Molloy has written distinct books, due less to the fact that a translation ought always to stand on its own and more to the different persona Molloy adopts when writing in a different language. She slips into her \u201c\u2018English\u2019 voice to address an \u2018English\u2019-language reader.\u201d Molloy recognizes that altering her linguistic posture \u201caffects the task and performance of bilingualism,\u201d though what that does to the translation<\/span> of her text proves thorny. In <\/span>Living between Languages<\/span><\/i>, the afterword and foreword are swapped. Molloy reworked many of the Spanish-language excerpts in <\/span>Varied Imagination<\/span><\/i>, omitting, retooling, and \u201cscrambling\u201d some of them to varying degrees. For example, in \u201cDying Words,\u201d she adds Julius Caesar\u2019s famous \u201cEt tu, Brute\u201d to a list of other notable, less-Anglocentric last words, a new item in the series for her English readers. In \u201cMisiones,\u201d the description of the Swiss hotel she visits in northern Argentina morphs from a menacing, though beautiful locale to one much more approachable and benign in the English. A bath basin transformed into a \u201cserpentario\u201d when overrun by snakes and a visit to a cemetery are both excised from the English, pivoting away from the original (if we can even call it that) focus on the setting\u2019s \u201cmezcla de Heidi con Conrad\u201d [mix of <\/span>Heidi <\/span><\/i>and Joseph Conrad\u2019s <\/span>Heart of Darkness<\/span><\/i>] to one highlighting other travelers\u2019 misadventures in language and place-based food. The linguistic performances of the two versions of the text are the same though not identical, like twin globes tilted along different axes. The way the viewer receives and interprets the material has been fundamentally altered.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It seems this is also one of the ways Molloy approached her work of writing and translating: from a remove. When dealing with pesky beginnings and the daunting blank page, she describes relying on the intermediary of a second language as a means of approach. Beginning in whichever language is <\/span>not <\/span><\/i>the target, she can write, free and without pressure, before ultimately translating herself into the intended language. Despite its visible strings\u2014the trappings of the performance are ever before her\u2014Molloy accepts the effectiveness of this \u201claborious artifice.\u201d This anecdote demonstrates an idea she explicitly references throughout <\/span>Living between Languages<\/span><\/i>, and one implicitly operating throughout her oeuvre: a bilingual person must choose a language as the point of support whence they establish a relationship to their other language(s) \u201cas absence, or rather as shadow, the object of linguistic desire.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Translators are intimately acquainted with this posture of \u201clinguistic desire.\u201d We read a text in one language and strive to bring it truthfully and carefully into another, but this exercise is asymptotic. We approach the original\u2019s characteristics, but we can never completely reach them all. It is impossible. But out of this effortful engagement comes something dynamic, new, and recognizable. Translation is a fraught business for Molloy, who finds \u201cnonentity\u201d an appropriate description of the \u201ctask of the translator or the life of the bilingual subject.\u201d Being between languages for Molloy is inextricably intertwined with being between homes, even identities or versions of the self. There is an alienation inherent in being bilingual, and the bilingual subject\u2019s power is both \u201cprivilege\u201d and \u201cundoing.\u201d Their writing is \u201calways thirsting, always wanting, never satisfied.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To read <\/span>Crossings <\/span><\/i>is to see Molloy as author and translator, playwright and actor. The companion texts move the reader beyond merely witnessing a performance to stepping backstage and seeing its hidden machinery. Molloy admits that she enjoys translating her own writing between Spanish and English because they \u201cimprove with this shuttling.\u201d Such is the case here, though where that improvement lies is subjective. What is improved, and which text is improved upon? If we follow Molloy\u2019s line of thinking, the Spanish versions of these works\u2014which happened to be published before their English counterparts\u2014are the arbitrary points of support where we begin. However, our concept of an \u201coriginal\u201d fractures, incapable as we are to evaluate one text, or one language, or one self against another. As Molloy asks at the end of <\/span>Living between Languages<\/span><\/i>, \u201cIn what language does memory speak, when the mind is shattered and reminiscence spent?\u201d One answer could be to follow the disparate traces and see where the meandering journey takes you and who you become along the way.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\nBuy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/span><\/h5>\n