Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir
by Suzanne Jill Levine
Unfaithful is a latter-day odyssey of this creative translator of Latin American literature, first following the recollections of a young woman in the late nineteen sixties, seventies, and beyond who was learning her art and navigating complex relationships, sometimes audaciously, in a male-dominated field and a pre #MeToo world.
Part One: Close Encounters
From her beginnings in a Jewish family as a native New Yorker, growing up in a crowded Washington Heights apartment as one of four children, one of whom, a sister, would become a tragic Hollywood starlet, she won a scholarship at age twelve to Juilliard as a promising young pianist. But, as Levine writes, “childhood ends abruptly upon the death of my mother, and at age sixteen I leave the city with a scholarship for Vassar College and return as a graduate student at Columbia University after spending a changing year in Spain at age nineteen.” The narrative swiftly moves through four chapters that guide the reader around a maze of literary and personal discoveries, particularly regarding the exceptional writers she translated extensively and knew intimately, all of whom were central figures in the Latin Boom.
Part Two: Stops Along the Way
From the seventies through the late eighties, this moveable feast continued with scenes of friendship and informal exchanges with significant cultural figures of the twentieth-century, among them Pablo Neruda, Carlos Fuentes, Reinaldo Arenas, and Susan Sontag. Sontag was among other North American and European writers who supported the introduction of trail-blazing works of Latin American literature to the attention of anglophone readers for the first time, inspiring a rich dialogue between the Americas that continues to expand today.
Bio-bibliography:
Born in New York City, and a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Suzanne Jill Levine 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. Her latest publication is the long poem or journal Notes from the Sea: A Diary (White Pine Press, 2024) by Chilean poet, memoirist, novelist, and Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College Marjorie Agosín (White Pine Press, 2024). She has completed a ‘translator’s memoir’ which has been featured in several journals including Another Chicago Magazine, Review Magazine (CUNY) and the Catamaran Reader.
Samples
Published sample from Chapter 9: “Carlos Fuentes on Central Park West: scenes from A Life in Translation”, Another Chicago Magazine (May 18, 2023)
Foreword
Visiting the past gives us a chance to enlighten and, perhaps, in more than one sense, to lighten the present. History and my story cross paths here, beginning in the era of the Cuban missile crisis and unfolding in New York City in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s—and beyond. The political turmoil around the revolution, a mere ninety miles south of Key West, fomented worldwide interest not only in Cuba but all of Latin America. Prestigious presses in Paris and New York were suddenly eager to discover and publish great masters like Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and a cast of new writers from Cuba and Mexico to Brazil and Argentina. This literary goldmine was popularly called “the Boom.” As a young translator, I had the good fortune of being there.
Suzanne Jill Levine Santa Barbara, 2023
Praise from Readers
“Really enjoyed the excerpt from your book. A wonderful swirl of literary figures. It made me think of a much more modern version of Kay Boyle’s memoir, or even a Latin-American “A Moveable Feast” (although we’re not allowed to mention him [Hemingway] anymore :)”
— Lee Percy, A.C.E., award-winning film editor & screenwriter
“This is a fascinating book, not only for the magnificent list of people involved (this translator was in the front row of our literature at its best moment!) but even more for the fluidities it embraces -- fluidities across generations, desires, genders, languages...And the whole thing is being kept together by the process of translation (as metaphor, as art and as business). And then there is this enchanting, sexy, and witty authorial voice. Potentially scandalous revelations are shared as joy and discovery, not as gossip -- as if the tree of knowledge had never been prohibited. How do you do that?”
— Leo Cabranes-Grant, Professor, UCSB, Playwright and Latin American Scholar
“Your text is by turns caustic, witty, and incisive; you really have a great knack for placing the reader right in the very amusing middle of things.”
— Ross Posnock, Distinguished Professor, English Department, Columbia University, NY
“I like the way you couch the lit experience with the socio political and memoir. All of this makes sense, and, of course, as we collectively begin to enter the city of amnesia and the century of dumb fuckery, your book is absolutely necessary.”
— Tod Thilleman, Spuyten Duyvil Press
Press
Bloomsbury Academic Announces:
TRANSLATED BY is a series dedicated to promoting translators' perspectives on their contributions to literary production, networks, and histories. It prioritizes writing by translators on translation, recognizing their creative and intellectual activity, and expands titles available in English about translation. The title of the series makes up for all the times the words "Translated by" were left off the cover of a book or excluded from literary history, and its incompleteness epitomizes the essential role of the translator in the making of literature. Overall, this series creates a space for translators to be recognized for the full range of their activity in literary networks.
The series publishes:
1) books authored by translators, either in English or English translation, on the practice and profession, the art of translation, and their lives and experiences;
2) monographs, either in English or English translation, on translators in history (aka deceased translators who can no longer write about their own work);
3) edited volumes of essays, either in English or English translation, on the above topics.
The series is open to translators and scholars working in all languages. This can include publications that discuss multiple languages and translation.
Our first book in the series is UNFAITHFUL: A TRANSLATOR'S MEMOIR by Suzanne Jill Levine. In this witty and incisive memoir, Levine - winner of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation - establishes a new way of writing about a translator's life. Levine analyses how her openness to 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 fleshes out the embodied nature of translation in provocative detail, with humor and style.
