Crossings: ’Varied Imagination’ and ’Living Between Languages’

A captivating exploration of identity, language, and memory, weaving together whimsical and profound vignettes that challenge our understanding of home and self in a multicultural world.

In Crossings, Sylvia Molloy embarks on an evocative exploration of the intricate and profound experience of living between languages, cultures, and geographies. A pioneering Argentine writer, fluent in Spanish, English, and French, Molloy inhabited all three languages, shuttling back, forth, and between, aware that each place and each language bring forth a different self.

The short entries that make up ＂Varied Imagination＂ and ＂Living Between Languages＂--the two collections gathered in this volume for the first time--revolve around an interrelated set of questions. What makes ＂home＂? Does language make or destabilize a sense of home? How does speaking a language or switching between languages perform one’s place in the world? These vignettes capture the realization that the most seemingly natural things in life--such as home, language, and identity--depend entirely on performance. Each act, each word communicates something, means something, does something to their specific audience; another audience might react quite differently. Molloy wrote, rewrote, edited, and reworked to find the right mix to express the estar entre or ＂between＂ that was her life.

In this compelling volume, Molloy’s reflections on the fluidity of identity and the transient nature of home resonate deeply, prompting readers to contemplate the profound connections between language, place, memory, and lived experience.

Sylvia Molloy (1938-2022) was a novelist, essayist, and leading literary critic of Latin American literature. Her critical works include At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America and Hispanisms and Homosexualities. She authored two novels in Spanish and several books of short prose pieces. Molloy was a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She served as president of the Modern Language Association and of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Diana Taylor is university professor of performance studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author of several books, most recently ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence. She is the founder and former director of the Hemispheric Institute and was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. She is a current member of the Academy of Arts and Science.