Overview

In this witty and incisive memoir, Suzanne Jill Levine – winner of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation – establishes a new way of writing about a translator’s life. 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.

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Reviews

Jill is a legend: I don’t know another translator who could write a book like this. Her portraits of Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and other icons of the Latin American literary scene of the 1960s and 70s are intimate (in every sense), affectionate, and exuberantly campy. * Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666 * Suzanne Jill Levine as a very young woman landed in the midst of the Latin American Boom. She knew everyone, from Borges to Fuentes, from Puig to Cabrera Infante—and also translated many of them, with verve and inventiveness. In Unfaithful, she gives us a playful, sexy, insightful account of what it all meant. A book of great charm and insight. * Peter Brooks, Yale University, USA * Unfaithful establishes a new way of writing about a translator’s life. What Levine does in her highly-charged, dramatic, and explicit narrative is create the style to communicate her particular experience. Levine sets the bar high by showing how being the right person in the right place at that right time, by virtue of her own energy, imagination, and creativity, she was a crucible for enabling the success of a number of ‘Boom’ authors. She is deliberately provocative. * Peter Bush, translator of Luis Martín-Santos’s Time of Silence *

Author Information

Suzanne Jill Levine is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese at University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and recipient of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation, which recognizes the translator’s lifetime achievements. An eminent translator whose prolific literary career began in the early 1970s, she has won many honors and translated over forty volumes of Latin American fiction. Editor and co-translator of the five-volume series of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry and non-fictions for Penguin paperback classics (2010), her most recent translation, Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories, was shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. She is also author of The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991; 2006) and the biography Manuel Puig & the Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions (2000).

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