Chaucer’s Books will host author Suzanne Jill Levine for a book talk and signing of “Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir,” 6 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 6 at Chaucer’s, 3321 State St., Santa Barbara.
 
“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,” Chaucer’s said.



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, ’70s and beyond.



In “Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir,” Levine interweaves her personal history and translation history in an important period.

She 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.

Levine 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.



“… 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 50 years of work,” Chaucer’s said.

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.

She has also championed many gender-fluid and gay authors.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 
 
 
 




 
 
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
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