Dislocations

How do you keep a friendship intact, when Alzheimer's has stolen the common ground of language, memory, and experience, that unites you?

In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy's Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too--M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend.

This loss holds Molloy's sense of herself too--the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend's memory does. But the writer remains: 'I'm not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there's nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'

Sylvia Molloy (Buenos Aires, 1938-2022) was a novelist, essayist, and a leading literary critic of Latin American literature. She was 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 programme of its kind in the United States. She was the author of two novels: En común olvido (Shared Oblivion, 2002) and En breve cárcel (Soon Jail, 1981), and had written several books of short prose including: Varia imaginación (Varied Imagination, 2003), Citas de lectura (Reading Dates, 2017), Vivir entre lenguas (Living Between Languages, 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 was a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Dislocations is her first book of fiction to appear in English.

Jennifer Croft won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She has also translated Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula's August, Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.