ISSN: 1579-9794
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LEVINE, SUZANNE JILL. UNFAITHFUL: A TRANSLATOR’S MEMOIR.
NEW YORK AND LONDON, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, 2025, 184 PP.,
ISBN 979-8-7651-3373-6
Narrativizing one’s life is essentially an act of translation, insofar the
autobiographer displaces self and memory to become other through written
language. “Just as the autobiographer is reading herself/himself otherwise,”
argues Bella Brodzki, “so is the translator inscribing herself/himself through
an other’s voice and text, into another linguistic or signifying form. To write is
to be written, to narrate is to be narrated, to translate is to be translated” (p. 19;
emphasis in the original). Brodzki’s formulation of autobiography as self-
translation resonates with a relatively recent interest in shifting attention away
from translated texts toward the agent who produces them: the translator
(Pym, 1998; Chesterman, 2009). The so-called translator’s turn has been
useful in reconsidering the role of women translators in history (Simon, 1996).
Often, because of their status as marginal figures in both the literary field and
society, our access to these women translators’ lives has come through
valuable feminist biographical scholarship (e.g., Hayes, 2008; Brown, 2022;
Misiou, 2023). It is within this turn toward the woman translator as subject that
I believe Suzanne Jill Levine’s Unfaithful intervenes, offering a complementary
perspective, in that, thanks to her cultural capital as one of the most prolific
U.S. translators of contemporary Latin American literature, she can enact that
very displacement that Brodzki describes in her article. With the publication of
her memoir, in short, we witness a living translator staging a self-translation
of her own professional and personal life into written form.
Unfaithful, however, is not Levine’s first autobiographical project. Her
1991 book The Subversive Scribe traced her translation poetics, showing how
she transformed texts of the Latin American Boom through experimental
techniques that challenged traditional notions of fidelity. By casting her
reflections in the first person, Levine paved the way for other U.S. translators
to shape their own experiences into book-length “literary and belletristic
apologia for translation” (Woods, 2024, p. 121). This later memoir, by contrast,
foregrounds how her own persona - her aspirations and vulnerabilities as a
young woman translator navigating a man’s world of letters - was not just
mediated by texts, but shaped, reshaped, and even unsettled, by the
relationships that were forged while translating these works. Read
together - in fact, some aspects from the first book are retold in this one - the
two works complement each other: while the first articulates translation as an
experimental method, adopting a more academic stance grounded in
postmodernist theory, the second does it as lived experience from a more
literary and narrative perspective, highlighting how translation is not only a
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feminist textual intervention but also a material, shaping force forging one’s
own life and identity.
To appreciate how Levine enacts this self-translation, it helps to
consider the memoir’s two-part structure. The first, “Closed Encounters,”
includes six long chapters. The first two trace how Levine’s early loss of her
mother led her to discover a passion for Spanish in college, ultimately guiding
her toward a career as a literary translator. These chapters show that
language for Levine was erotically charged from the beginning (see Kellmann,
2013; Woods, 2025). Chapter 3 explores Levine’s romantic relationship with
Uruguayan literary critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal - perhaps the most
influential gatekeeper of contemporary Latin American literature in the U.S. at
that time - twenty-five years her senior. Through him, Levine is granted access
to vibrant Latin American literary circles, which led to lifelong friendships with
some of the authors she would go on to translate.
While the rapid international recognition of Latin American fiction writers
in the 1960s can certainly be attributed to their literary brilliance, it is also
inseparable from the political conditions of the Cold War. In the wake of the
Cuban Revolution, Latin America became a key cultural and political
battleground, and several translation initiatives fostered through U.S. state-
private networks played an important role in amplifying this literature’s reach
(Mudrovcic, 2002; Franco, 2002; Cohn, 2012; Iber, 2015). Yet, while Levine
acknowledges these dynamics as factors that shaped her entry into literary
translation from a young age, she instead highlights how the theoretical
underpinnings of the 1960s and 1970s sexual liberation movements informed
her practice: “The war, like the world, belonged to men […]. Nonetheless, as
the Sixties became the Seventies, my consciousness was raised especially
around sexual politics, its impact on every individual, on the arts and every
aspect of life, especially on the lives and rights of women” (Levine, 2025, p.
24). As such, Levine offers an honest attempt to explore her own identity not
so much as a translator, but as a woman who finds her identity through
translation at a specific historical moment marked by two episodes that are
usually not studied together: the Cold War and the sexual liberation
movements.
By structuring her self-translation around the lives of these male writers
she translated, Levine weaves their trajectories into her own identitarian
struggle, poignantly rendering identity, translation, and her autobiographical
writing as inherently relational. This is particularly explored in the chapter
dedicated to Monegal. It is a candid recollection of the Uruguayan critic yet is
juxtaposed with poignant reflections on the asymmetries of age, gender, and
institutional power that shaped their bond - an ambivalence that runs
throughout the memoir. In the remaining chapters of this first part, we are
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moved by the ways in which this uncertainty about her own identity gradually
takes shape through translation. Thanks to her friendship with gay writer
Manuel Puig, she explores her (until then secret) bisexuality, equating it to her
practice: “being a translator was a creative way to deal with ambivalence, with
one’s “fluidity,” […] translating meant finding ways to resolve ambivalence, at
least on the written page. And with gay men, I could sidestep the obstacle of
ambivalence and turn it into subversive irreverence” (pp. 85-85). She feels
empowered to challenge sexist attitudes from Guillermo Cabrera Infante after
revealing to him, while translating one of his books, her decision to live with a
woman. Through her affair with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Levine comes to
understand translation is also an intimate, erotic, encounter between
translator and author. Her descriptions of these writers are nuanced, treating
them with candour while showing their imperfections, but what emerges most
clearly is Levine’s struggle to find her (young) voice in a male-dominated
world.
Surrounded by memories of ghosts, that is, of these male writers she
translated but who are no longer alive, she asks herself the following in the
“Entr’acte” section dividing the memoir’s two parts:
[L]ife sometimes seems like acting rather than being. Or seducing
and being seduced, only to discover, one day, that maybe the only
way to know love is to know that one is loved. Which person-I, one,
she-is speaking? Like all pronouns "I" belongs to everyone and to
no one. I have lived between two worlds, from my early twenties until
now, between two ways of speaking: English, my first language, and
Spanish, the language she translates. Which speaker is the real me?
(Levine, 2025, p. 123)
Levine’s description of herself echoes Naoki Sakai’s (2009, p. 86) definition of
the translator as a fractured-I, by means of which “the temporality of ‘I speak’
[…] necessarily introduces […] an irreparable distance between the subject of
the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated” (consider the parallels with
Brodzki’s definition of the autobiographer). It suddenly becomes clear that,
what might have seemed until then descriptions of male friendships, were
instead a carefully constructed narrative of feminist, queer self-discovery, a
“theory in the flesh” (Moraga 2002, p. 21) in which Levine uses her
recollections of her own sexual and sentient body to develop a suggestive
understanding of translation as erotics and translators as erotic beings. By
framing her narrative through these relationships, Levine skilfully avoids the
pitfalls of self-idealization often associated with autobiographical writing,
allowing her identity to emerge in a nuanced manner. In doing so, her work
challenges the notion of Romantic, individualistic genius, showing that one’s
retelling of memories is inseparable from retelling the lives of others. While
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ultimately aimed at understanding herself, the memoir never lapses into
solipsism, demonstrating how translators’ memoirs offer an invaluable
alternative to conventional ways of writing about the self. This is further
reflected in her playful, bold prose, which balances intellectual reflection with
intimate, sexually charged storytelling. Her daring voice makes the memoir
engaging not only for translations scholars but also for general readers, for
whom Levine’s style offers a direct invitation to appreciate how translators’
memoirs contribute to our understanding of translators as sentient, whole
persons rather than mere professionals.
This is further explored in the second section of the memoir, “Stops
Along the Way.” While these snapshots might have benefitted from greater
detail, particularly relevant is the first one, “Sketches of Susan,” where
Levine’s relationship with Susan Sontag not only serves to acknowledge the
lack of female support among artists during that time, but also works as a
symbol of the need for women to tell their own stories. Other highlights are
“Carlos Fuentes on Central Park” and the memoir’s epilogue, “At a Bus Stop
on Sunset Boulevard.” In the former, Levine reappropriates the figure of Lolita
- a “questionable accolade” (p. 138) Carlos Fuentes gave her and which she
understands as alluding both to her youth as a translator of erotically charged
texts and to the age difference with Monegal - to expose how her subversively
feminist translation practices were nonetheless instrumental in consecrating
these older male authors. In the latter, Levine describes a rewatching of an
episode of a TV series where her estranged sister Carol appeared in the
1950s to demonstrate how, in her performance, her own personality still
flourished, ultimately demonstrating that, professionally, we leave intimate
traces of ourselves, that we are always performing a translation in the flesh.
All these chapters allow her to reach a conclusion: visibility must not
only revolve around the recognition of the translator’s work. When we explore
the life of a translator, it is as equally important to consider them as embodied,
performative beings. By being “aware of performance,” translators can
“adventure an erotics of translation” (p. 158), where both the process (the self
in translation) and the product of translation (the text) are charged with affect
and desire. Loving the text (and the author) means also allowing ourselves to
leave the rigid structures that have traditionally tended to regard translation as
an objective task and identity as monolithic. If autobiography is a modality of
translation, then, the memoir of a translator is doubly so: it stages the
performativity of translation, translators, and identities to show that, as feminist
and queer activists have continually asserted, the personal is politically (and
literarily) relevant. In doing so, Unfaithful participates in what one hopes to be
a growing list of works, arguably initiated by Kate Brigg’s This Little Art (2017),
that take autobiography to discuss the relation between self, desire, and
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translation and that highlight Klaus Kaindl’s (2021) invitation to consider the
translators’ personal lives as scholarly valuable.
Unfaithful thus becomes a perfect opening of what the new Bloomsbury
series “Translated By” can offer to the field. Levine’s work hopefully works to
prop open a door through which more works from lesser-known translators
and networks of translators that facilitated literary and knowledge circulation
beyond the dominant Global North–South and the centre-periphery axes.
Similarly, one hopes that the series may enhance the representational
currency of other cultural mediators (Roig-Sanz and Meylaerts, 2018) who
partake in the making of translations, such as editors or literary agents. Such
first-person perspectives would not only expand the affective component that
characterizes our field but also underscore how first-person narratives of
agents of translation actively participate in producing alternative forms of
cultural and intellectual contact.
In the meantime, we can rejoice in Levine’s memoir, which, while
somewhat brief, daringly invites us to approach translators as subjects who,
by the nature of their task, embody a queer understanding of identity that is
not fixed, but always in transit, continually reshaped through intimate and
erotic encounters with others; translational, in sum.
REFERENCES
Briggs, K. (2017). This Little Art. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Brodzki, B. (2017). Autobiography, Memory, Translation. Translation: A
Transdisciplinary Journal 5, 17-40.
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15516
Brown, H. (2022). Women and Early Modern Cultures of Translation: Beyond
the Female Tradition. Oxford University Press.
Chesterman, A. (2009). The Name and Nature of Translator Studies. Hermes
42, 13-22. https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v22i42.96844
Cohn, D.S. (2012). The Latin American Boom and US Nationalism. Vanderbilt
University Press
Franco, J. (2002). The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Harvard
University Press.
Hayes, J. C. (2008). Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and
England, 1600-1800. Stanford University Press.
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Kaindl, K. (2021). (Literary) Translator Studies: Shaping the Field. In K. Kaindl,
W. Kolb & D. Schlager (Eds.), Literary Translator Studies, (pp. 1-38).
John Benjamins.
Kellman, S. (2013). Promiscuous Tongues: Erotics of Translingualism and
Translation. Neo-helicon 40, 35-45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-
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Iber, P. (2015). Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin
America. Harvard University Press.
Levine, S.J. (1991). The Subversive Scribe. Graywolf Press.
Levine, S.J. (2025). Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir. Bloomsbury.
Misiou, V. (2023). The Renaissance of Women Translators in 19th-Century
Greece. Routledge.
Moraga, C. (2002). Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh. In C.
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Pym, A. (1998). Method in Translation History. St. Jerome.
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Woods, M. (2025). Translation and Eroticism. In B.J. Baer & S. Bassi (Eds.),
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Sexuality, (pp. 48-63).
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[JAVIER DE LA MORENA-CORRALES]
