Suzanne Jill Levine, UNFAITHFUL: A TRANSLATOR'S MEMOIR

Join esteemed professor of Spanish and Portuguese and translator, and winner of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation, Suzanne Jill Levine in store for a discussion of her new memoir, Unfaithful: A Translator's Memoir. In Unfaithful, Levine interweaves her personal history and translation history in an important period. Levine analyzes how her openness to another culture and new experiences, along with a knack for translating the most difficult Latin American novels and positive interactions with her authors, took her from a modest New York background into a whole new literary and linguistic world.

Levine is a living legend in the translation world who credits her good fortune as a young translator to being in the right place at the right time: beginning in the era of the Cuban revolution, with growing interest in Latin America and its writers, and unfolding in New York City in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s and beyond.

In Unfaithful: A Translator's Memoir, Levine interweaves her personal history and translation history in an important period. Levine analyzes how her openness to another culture and new experiences, along with a knack for translating the most difficult Latin American novels and positive interactions with her authors, took her from a modest New York background into a whole new literary and linguistic world. She also writes about how her friendship and then long relationship with Uruguayan writer and intellectual Emir Rodríguez Monegal helped her develop her career, and how translating creatively subversive Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Manuel Puig – taking on the task of making spoken Cuban and Argentine into a new literary language in translation – was her true entry into the world of writing.

It is now common for translation scholars to talk about the “embodied” nature of the act of translation. Levine fleshes out that embodiment in provocative detail, with humor and style.

Suzanne Jill Levine was Born in New York City and is a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She translated over forty works of the famous Latin American Boom, fiction and poetry, beginning with the Argentine Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers. Levine’s scholarly and non-fiction books include The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Graywolf, 1991, reissued by Dalkey Archive), which was highly influential in the development of the field of international translation studies, and the literary biography of Manuel Puig and The Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000; reprinted by Faber & Faber, UWP 2002). An eminent translator, writer, and poet whose prolific literary and academic career began in the early 1970s, her translations have included Julio Cortazar, Silvina Ocampo, Clarice Lispector, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Cristina River Garza, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Luis Borges, and several books by Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Severo Sarduy and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Her many honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, several PEN awards--the PEN Center USA’s Translation Award (2012) and the PEN American Gregory Kolovakis Award in Hispanic Letters (1996); the Mellon Fellowship in Women’s Studies (1979), translation grants from the NEA and NEH, and the Rockefeller Residency in Bellagio, Italy. Editor and co-translator of the five-volume series of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry and non-fiction works for Penguin paperback classics (2010), her recent translation of Mexican Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories was shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. She is the recipient of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation, which recognizes the translator’s lifetime achievements. Her latest book is Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir (Bloomsbury Press, 2025).

Pre-order your copy of Unfaithful here.

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