Chaucer’s Book Talk – Suzanne Jill Levine

Description:

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.-From Bloomsbury.com website 

Winner of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim translation prize for lifetime achievement, Suzanne Jill Levine has devoted her life to practicing, investigating, and teaching the art of literary translation. The ascent of Latin American literature in the anglophone world since the Latin Boom and the current state of the art of translation are inseparable from her more than fifty years of work.

Her translations of critical Latin American authors profoundly impacted and broadened the variety of Hispanic literature in translation with innovative works by such writers as Clarice Lispector, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and she has championed many gender-fluid and gay authors.

A scholar, prolific translator, bilingual writer and poet, and mentor to scores of essential translators active in our field today, Levine’s brilliance, famous sense of humor, and scholarly writing have been crucial to the development of the field of Translation Studies and have left a profound mark on the North-South dialogue. –via the author’s website. 

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”