Unfaithful
A Translator's Memoir
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Unfaithful
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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
[An] exuberant and probing memoir.
Unfaithful lends individual insight to the life of renowned translator Suzanne Jill Levine, with interesting anecdotes spanning her enduring career. Where Levine shines is in her successful positioning of her experiences within the shifting sociopolitical contexts that she has needed to contend with and adapt to throughout her career.
[This reviewer] was moved by the honesty of this book, and fascinated by the portraits Levine creates of so many of the key figures of Latin American literature.
It is, quite simply, a delight – a lively, candid, and intelligent memoir that will make any reader, translator or otherwise, want to pick up the books she has championed.
Suzanne Jill Levine’s Unfaithful offers a front-row seat to the Boom ... If ever anyone was in the right place at the right time, Levine was, and her fast-paced (and sometimes racy!) memoir details her work and relationships with many of these great writers. ... Levine proves that a translator is a writer’s closest reader, and that she is very much a writer herself. Indispensable for lovers of Latin American literature.
The impact that Boom writers and their works have had on several generations of readers – from the education of literary taste to the awareness of history and politics – is a reality that Unfaithful complements in essential ways
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.
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.
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.
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