Versions & subversions.

• Author: Taylor, Edward F., Jr.
• Position: Interview with translator Suzanne Jill Levine - Interview

Suzzane Jill Levine, translator of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Manuel Puig, and many other Latin American writers, thoughtfully explores the nature of the translator's art

"We translate to be translated," writes Suzanne Jill Levine in her book The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Levine is professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and translator of such writers as Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortazar, Jose Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, and Severo Sarduy.

As readers, we move from one language to another not only to understand another reality, but also to transform our own. And, that dance between languages is no passive process of finding literal correspondences: It is a muscular, transforming, interpretive act--poetic decision making, not dictionary page thumbing.

Translation is emblematic of the writer's limbo, trapped between arbitrary written language and mercurial reality--and the even more treacherous memory. The writer struggles to translate her or his formidable uniqueness into words: The translator wrestles the writer's world into an even more exotic reality, that of another language. The result? If successful--subversively reimagined--a new literary work, and a new life for the original: Manuel Puig's Boquitas Pintadas becomes Heartbreak Tango. If unsuccessful, a mere sub-version; in effect, a dead draft.

Levine's translations are often produced in close collaboration--"closelaboration," as Cabrera Infante termed their partnership--with authors, in a process akin to co-creation. Since beginning her career in the 1970s, she has translated over twenty books, including Selected Stories of Adolfo Bioy Casares, to be published this fall by New Directions; in addition to The Subversive Scribe, written three books on Latin American literature; with E. Rodriguez Monegal, edited a twentieth-century Latin American literature textbook; and published over 150 articles and translations in periodicals and anthologies.

Does she translate to be translated?

What drove me to be interested in translation was a twofold impulse--to know the other, and in some ways to discover yourself. When I was young I was very intrigued by learning a foreign language, Spanish, and also learning the culture the language was inscribed in; I wanted to find a way to bring home this culture in my own terms--find the relationship it had with my own life.

After I graduated [following a year as a student in Madrid], I was more drawn to Latin America than to Spain, partly because I thought there was a lot more in common with North America. There was a sophistication in the cultures of cities like Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, or Montevideo--a sophistication in the city cultures of Latin America that I as a New Yorker felt an affinity with. It has to do with the mixing of races, the presence of immigrants, and with the issues and realities of the New World, which takes in the Old World and moves on.

In terms of writing and language, I wanted to explore--by exploring how to translate, for example, spoken words in a very particular regional context into something that would be lively and evocative in my own language. Translation is really a mode of writing, which is what Walter Benjamin said. It's an incredibly creative activity, although not seen that way by Western culture, particularly in the last few centuries...