IHC Humanities Decanted: Suzanne Jill Levine

Join us for a dialogue between Suzanne Jill Levine (Spanish and Portuguese) and Leo Cabranes-Grant (Spanish and Portuguese) about Levine’s new book, 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. Unfaithful was recently listed by Words Without Borders as a 2025 best book in the field of translation.

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).

Refreshments will be served.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment