In this witty and incisive memoir, Suzanne Jill Levine – winner of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation – establishes a new way of writing about a translator's life. In Unfaithful: A Translator's Memoir, Levine interweaves her personal history and translation history in an important period. Levine analyzes how her openness to another culture and new experiences, along with a knack for translating the most difficult Latin American novels and positive interactions with her authors, took her from a modest New York background into a whole new literary and linguistic world. She also writes about how her friendship and then long relationship with Uruguayan writer and intellectual Emir Rodríguez Monegal helped her develop her career, and how translating creatively subversive Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Manuel Puig – taking on the task of making spoken Cuban and Argentine into anew literary language in translation – was her true entry into the world of writing. It is now common for translation scholars to talk about the “embodied” nature of the act of translation. Levine fleshes out that embodiment in provocative detail, with humor and style.