Entrevista com Suzanne Jill Levine

Esta entrevista com Suzanne Jill Levine foi realizada em dezembro de 2018. Nela, a professora e tradutora premiada de literatura latino-americana conversa sobre sua prolífica carreira como tradutora literária na qual o aspecto criativo sempre teve um papel central. A entrevista também aborda questões importantes para os Estudos da Tradução como tradução colaborativa, autotradução, o papel das mulheres tradutoras, bem como assuntos mais gerais como a circulação de literatura latino-americana e a escrita de biografias.

A Translator’s Apologia

Literary translators are often too shy to discuss their own practice. As the penury of translators’ prefaces would attest, they have assimilated the fidelity imperative only too well and, even though they may be masters at transforming the literal into the literary, they prefer to remain invisible behind their author as if only the latter were real and they merely fiction(al) workers. Such doesn’t appear to be the case for two translators of Tres Tristes Tigres by the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante: the first, Albert Bensoussan, working in French and the author of Confessions d’un traître (PU de Rennes, 1995); the second, Suzanne Jill Levine, working in English and the author of The Subversive Scribe (Graywolf Press, 1991). While it is undeniable that their respective collaboration with authors of the calibre of Cabrera Infante must have played a large part in their desire to write of what must have been an unforgettable experience, this paper will focus on different questions in order to gain insight into the theorization by translators of their own practice: Why and how do both Bensoussan and Levine produce prize-winning translations of famously difficult and considered “untranslatable” works? Why, in spite of their success and ability to push translational creativity to its limits, are they ultimately incapable of dispelling a sense of betrayal? Rather than providing definitive answers, exploring these questions leads to reflect on possibly constant factors in literary translation and on teaching or evaluating translations as well as training translators.

Pizarnik through Levine’s Looking Glass: How Subversive Is the Scribe?1

Suzanne Jill Levine is known above all for her English translations of Cabrera Infante, Sarduy and Puig, with whom she worked closely. While a lot has been written about her translations of fiction by men, little research has been done on her translations of women writers. In this paper, I analyse a selection of her English renditions of Alejandra Pizarnik in order to see how Levine behaves when translating the poetic work of a woman. First, considering that Levine describes herself as a “subversive scribe, ‘transcreating’ writing that stretches the boundaries of patriarchal discourse,” how does the fact that she shares the author’s gender affect her “transcreations?” Then, bearing in mind that Levine has often stressed the complexity of fiction translation, refuting the “common belief that novels are easier to translate than poetry,” how does she deal with the translation of lyrical poems? And last, how rebellious is she when translating an author who has passed away and whom she cannot consult?