Beyond Borders: A Reading with Translators Elizabeth Lowe and Suzanne Jill Levine
Join the Gentzler Translation Center and the MFA for Poets and Writers for a reading with acclaimed literary translators, Elizabeth Lowe and Suzanne Jill Levine. They will read from their new memoirs: Translating from the Portuguese: A Life Translated (Tagus Press, 2025) and Unfaithful: A Translator's Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2025). A limited number of free copies are available at the Gentzler Translation Center while supplies last!
Reception to follow.
Elizabeth Lowe received her B.A. from Barnard College (1969), her M.A. from Queens College (1975), and her PhD from the City University of New York (1977) in Comparative Literature and Translation. She is on the faculty of the New York University MS in Translation and Interpreting program. In 2022 she was the FLAD Endowed Chair of Portuguese Studies at UMass Dartmouth. Elizabeth was the founding director of the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has taught and lectured on translation at universities throughout the United States, South America, China and Europe. She is a specialist in translation pedagogy and theory. A literary translator, Elizabeth translates Luso-Afro-Brazilian fiction, as well as works from Latin American and peninsular Spanish. The Brazilian Academy of Letters recognized her translation of the canonical work Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha (Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, 2010). She is the author of The City in Brazilian Literature (1982) and Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (with Earl E. Fitz, 2007), along with many articles in journals and book chapters on translation criticism and theory. Elizabeth is a recipient of the NEA Literary Translation grant and Fulbright grants to Colombia and Brazil. Her memoir, Translating from the Portuguese: A Life Translated is out with Tagus Press.
Suzanne Jill Levine, Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California in Santa Barbara, has translated over forty works of the famous Latin American Boom, including fiction and poetry, beginning with the Argentine Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers. Levine’s scholarly and non-fiction books include The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Graywolf, 1991, reissued by Dalkey Archive), which was highly influential in the development of the field of international translation studies, and the literary biography of Manuel Puig and The Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000; reprinted by Faber & Faber, UWP 2002). An eminent translator, writer, and poet whose prolific literary and academic career began in the early 1970s, her translations have included Julio Cortazar, Silvina Ocampo, Clarice Lispector, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Cristina River Garza, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Luis Borges, and several books by Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Severo Sarduy and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Her many honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, several PEN awards--the PEN Center USA’s Translation Award (2012) and the PEN American Gregory Kolovakis Award in Hispanic Letters (1996); the Mellon Fellowship in Women’s Studies (1979), translation grants from the NEA and NEH, and the Rockefeller Residency in Bellagio, Italy. Editor and co-translator of the five-volume series of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry and non-fiction works for Penguin paperback classics (2010), her recent translation of Mexican Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories was shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. Her latest book is Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir (Bloomsbury Press, 2025).
Funding provided by the Chancellor's Community, Democracy, and Dialogue (CDD) working group. The CDD has been created to promote dialogue, academic inquiry, and respect for difference in addressing challenging topics. These are forms of enqagement central to higher education and a thriving democracy. Additional support provided by Edwin C. Gentzler Translation Center and the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets & Writers.