About this Event
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. The author will be joined in conversation with Erik Noonan, author of the poetry collections, Stances and Haiku d'Etat, in The Wanda Coleman Theater at Beyond Baroque. Book signings and reception to follow.
About Unfaithful: A Translator's Memoir
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.
Doors Open: 2:30 PM I Readings: 3:00 PM
About the authors
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).
is the author of the poetry collections and , and his poems appear in the anthology . His manuscript translation of Ricardo Piglia’s La invasión won the 2025 Sundial House Literary Translation Award from Columbia University, and in 2024 he received a South Asian Literature in Translation travel grant from the University of Chicago. A former editor at TriQuarterly, Los Angeles Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Asymptote, he is Managing Director at JackLeg Press and Assistant Dean at the San Francisco Film School.
About Beyond Baroque
is one of the United States' leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public's knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.
Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.
If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.
Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, 681 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 11.49
