Professor with Strong Santa Barbara Ties Receives Prestigious Translation Award Celebrating Career Achievement Across Five Decades 

If you’ve read a novel of Latin American origin in the past 50 years or so, chances are that UCSB’s own Suzanne Jill Levine had something to do with it. 

Levine, a distinguished translator of many significant Latin American texts and a Professor Emerita at UCSB, was named the recipient of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for career achievement in translation. The prestigious award given out by PEN America will be presented to Levine in a ceremony held at Town Hall in New York City on April 29. The award is conferred only once every three years to a translator who has demonstrated particular excellence in their field. 

Throughout Levine’s five-decade-long career, she has translated the likes of Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Manuel Puig — all significant figures in Latin American literature. She also served as editor and co-translator of Penguin’s five-volume paperback classics of the works of Jorge Luis Borges.

Her work began in 1971 with the publication of the critically acclaimed translation of Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. The novel is widely considered to be one of the greatest Cuban works of the 20th century.  

For Levine, her years of contributions have functioned as a means of connection across cultures, something she has not taken for granted. “My work as a translator has been very much about respect for difference,” she said. 

Apart from her prolific translation work, Levine has written extensively about the value and theories of her field. In 1991, she published The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. “By tracing the process of translating, [my book] explicitly shows readers how translation is a creative act and defines what a translator is, and why a translator needs to be a linguist, literary critic, and poet or novelist all in one,” she said. 

Levine, who grew up in New York City and went on to get her PhD at New York University, began as a professor at UCSB in 1988. Since then, she has cultivated strong ties to the community. 

Between 1989 and 2002, she played a major role in bringing several Latin American writers to speak at the university, the most recent of which was Mario Vargos Llosa, a Nobel laureate. 

Levine remains active in the local literary community, regularly attending writing workshops around town, including recent readings at Chaucer’s Books and literary events at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Santa Barbara Library. “I’m very happy to be involved with the Santa Barbara community,” she said. 

Levine also played a key role in the connection between Santa Barbara–based artist and bookmaker Mary Heebner and Alastair Reid. Reid is the poet and translator with whom Heebner collaborated on an illustrated collection of Pablo Neruda’s poetry.  

Levine is now working on a memoir about her storied career, titled Chronicles of a Literary Translator. Excerpts of the upcoming book have appeared in several literary journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Review Magazine (CUNY), and the Catamaran Literary Reader. 

Apart from the PEN Award, Levine has received many honors throughout her career. These include NEA fellowships and NEH grants for literary translations, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the Rockefeller Residency Fellowship at Villa Serbelloni. 

This latest honor underscores her dedication to the field and enduring influence on the past half-century of Latin American literature English-speakers are given access to.