The 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation winner, Suzanne Jill Levine's witty and incisive memoir of her life as a translator - of writers such as Manuel Puig and Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

Foreword
Part I: Close Encounters
Prologue: The Latin American Boom
1. Beginnings
2. Living in Spanish
3. 1968: Emir and Latin Literary Life
4. Swinging London with Cabrera Infante
5. The Buenos Aires Affair in New York
6. With Bioy in the Bois de Boulogne
Intermezzo
Part II: Stops Along the Way
Entr'acte
7. Sketches of Susan
8. Three Feasts with Neruda
9. Carlos Fuentes on Central Park West
10. Key West with Reinaldo Arenas
Epilogue
Afterword
Index

Suzanne Jill Levine is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese at University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and recipient of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation, which recognizes the translator's lifetime achievements. An eminent translator whose prolific literary career began in the early 1970s, she has won many honors and translated over forty volumes of Latin American fiction. Editor and co-translator of the five-volume series of Jorge Luis Borges' poetry and non-fictions for Penguin paperback classics (2010), her most recent translation, Guadalupe Nettel's Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories, was shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. She is also author of The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991; 2006) and the biography Manuel Puig & the Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions (2000).