Translators from Spanish

Suzanne Jill Levine & Stephen Kessler

On Borges, translation as subversion, and outsider writers of all stripes

Monday, November 26, 7pm

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street (between Lafayette & Mulberry)

New York, NY  10012

Suzanne Jill Levine has received many honors for her translations of Latin American literature, most recently the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation, for The Lizard’s Tale, by José Donoso. She has long been the translator for the work of Manuel Puig and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and she was the general editor for the Penguin Classics Borges series, including the volumes Poems of the Night, The Sonnets, On Writing, On Argentina, and On Mysticism. She’s also the author of a biography of Puig, Manuel Puig and The Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions, a book on translating Latin American fiction, The Subversive Scribe, and a new chapbook, Reckoning. She is the founding editor of Translation Studies Journal at UCSB. More information can be found at her website: http://www.complit.ucsb.edu/projects/translationstudies/Jills_Site/Welcome.html

Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator, and editor. His version of Desolation of the Chimera by Luis Cernuda was selected by Edith Grossman for the 2010 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets. His other recent books include The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters (essays), The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (as editor and principal translator), The Mental Traveler (novel), and Burning Daylight (poems). He is also the editor of the quarterly literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review. His translation of Poems of Consummation by 1977 Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre will be published in early 2013 by Black Widow Press. More about Stephen Kessler is available on his website, www.stephenkessler.com.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.