Unfaithful

[An] exuberant and probing memoir. * Review *
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. * Territories *
[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. * Institute Of Translation & Interpreting Bulletin *
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. * World Literature Today *
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. * Samantha Schnee, Founding Editor and Chairman of the Board, Words Without Borders *
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 * Bookish & Co. *
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. * Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666 *
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. * Peter Brooks, Yale University, USA *
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. * Peter Bush, translator of Luis Martín-Santos’s Time of Silence *

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).

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