Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Unfaithful: A Translator's Memoir

Unfaithful: A Translator's Memoir

Levine, Suzanne Jill
Galasso, Regina
Pereira, Mario

Hardcover

Series: Translated by

Biographies GeneralLiterary CriticismWriting Instruction

ISBN13: 9798765133729
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Jun 12 2025
Pages: 184
Weight: 0.92
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Included in The Best Books in (and on) Translation We Read in 2025 by Words Without Borders

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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