The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Dalkey Archive Scholarly Series) [Paperback]

Suzanne Jill Levine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 6, 2009 | Series: Dalkey Archive Scholarly Series

A classic study of the art of translation from one of our greatest translators.

To most of us, “subversion” means political subversion, but The Subversive Scribe is about collaboration not with an enemy, but with texts and between writers. Though Suzanne Jill Levine is the translator of some of the most inventive Latin American authors of the twentieth century—including Julio Cortázar, G. Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, and Severo Sarduy—each of whom were revolutionaries not only on the page, but in confronting the sexual and cultural taboos of their respective countries, she considers the act of translation itself to be a form of subversion. Rather than regret translation’s shortcomings, Levine stresses how translation is itself a creative act, unearthing a version lying dormant beneath an original text, and animating it, like some mad scientist, in order to create a text illuminated and motivated by the original. In The Subversive Scribe, one of our most versatile and creative translators gives us an intimate and entertaining overview of the tricky relationships lying behind the art of literary translation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

What she [Levine] has to say about the linguistic, personal, scholarly, and imaginative elements that the translator must bring to that process is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of translation in particular and creativity in general.... An important and original book. (Edith Grossman, translator of Love in the Time of Cholera)

A continually lively and very generous book, full of lore and such a vivid and just account of how complex a process good writing is. (Susan Sontag)

An astonishing and explosive tour de force. (Douglas Robinson, author of What Is Translation?)

A fascinating glimpse into the mental gyrations of a first-class literary translator at work. (Clifford Landers, Latin American Research Review)

From the Back Cover

The Subversive Scribe
Suzanne Jill Levine

In The Subversive Scribe, one of our most versatile and creative translators of Latin American fiction offers an intimate glimpse into the remarkably complex relationships that lie behind the act of literary translation. In this highly accessible book-- hardly a how-to manual!-- Suzanne Jill Levine writes of intersections of language, life, and cultures, while she reveals to us the crucial part the translator of linguistically complex fiction plays in making such work available to readers of another language and culture.

"What she [Levine] has to say about the linguistic, personal, scholarly, and imaginative elements that the translator must bring to that process is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of translation in particular and creativity in general.... An important and original book."--Edith Grossman (translator of Love in the Time of Cholera)

Having translated Manuel Puig, Julio Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and other notable authors, Suzanne Jill Levine is uniquely qualified to address the topic of literary translation. She is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive (October 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564785637
• ISBN-13: 978-1564785633
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #855,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice treatment of Latin American translation issues., December 10, 2002

By 

Vanessa Ogilvy (State College, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Paperback)

Levine's book is a very personal exploration of the problems of translating not just one language into another (which is virtually impossible), but of translating from one or more culture(s) into another. Her specific experiences document in some detail the difficulties and possibilities that translating Latin American fiction into (American) English presents. Each of the four sections, "Puns: The Untranslatable", "Spoken into Written", "The Source of the Source", and "Words are Never the Same" takes the reader into her particular journeys through the jungles of translation difficulties - offering not only some of the options that presented themselves and were rejected, but also the reasoning that led to both the development of those options and the reasoning behind their being deemed inappropriate. What is especially productive and useful about this text to anyone interested in Latin American writing, translation studies, north-south relations in the Americas, etc. is that Levine's is an offering that goes into great detail about translation issues that are very specific to the Americas.
Levine has produced a book that confronts the complex relationship between the North and South Americas in all its multivalent intricacies of economics, politics, power and privilege, through her dissection of the particular translation practice of bringing some of the greatest literary works into the North American English forum. The strength of this book lies in the boundaries set by the author: by choosing to focus primarily on difficulties of translating puns, proper names, jokes, titles and other kinds of word-play, Levine has not only limited her scope geographically, but also literarily. By thus limiting her field of analysis, she offers a much more constructive and detailed picture of the importance of this particular area of translation.
The importance of her project, however, is betrayed by her own prefaces (two of them) and introduction to it. In her opening comments, Levine (like every translation theorist before or since) chases after her own reading of the relentless "traduttore, traditore" amid pages of apparent self-congratulation. There is nothing transgressive or subversive about her own general theorization about translation and the first twenty pages of her book are by far the weakest. Rather than making some attempt at clarifying the issues that will nuance much of the translation that she details through the subsequent chapters, she makes a vain effort to fabricate her own general theory of translation while weaving in several glowing reviews of her own work as a translator, from both critics and authors. As this is not what the book is about, it makes little sense for it to be the focus of her introduction. However, despite the relatively off-putting first twenty pages, the book is a good read and offers excellent insights into the very particular issues of the emerging field of hemispheric American studies.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant story, August 21, 2001

By 

Robert E. Lloyd (Deerfield Beach, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Paperback)

Whether you know a word of Spanish or not, this book is a pure delight. Levine spins a web about her many experiences trying to accomplish the impossible: putting into English so many words in Spanish that most will say must be read in the original. Her stories about Guillermo Cabrera Infante are particularly amusing and informative. This is a substantial contribution to the literature on the task of translation. If you know a lot about Latin American writing, you will appreciate the discussions of legendary authors....