Wednesday, April 7th: Jorge Luis Borges night with Suzanne Jill Levine and Stephen Kessler

Suzanne Jill Levine, director of Translation Studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, is general editor of Penguin Classics' five-volume series of the works of Jorge Luis Borges, which will be published this year. An eminent translator, scholar and critic of Latin American literature, her books including a literary biography of Manuel Puig and The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, reissued recently by Dalkey Archive Press.

Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, essayist, editor and novelist.  He is the author of eight books and chapbooks of original poetry, most recently Burning Daylight; fourteen books of literary translation, most recently Desolation of the Chimera: Last Poems by Luis Cernuda; a book of essays, Moving Targets: On Poets, Poetry & Translation; and a novel, The Mental Traveler.

After reading various unconvincing English versions of Spanish and Latin American poets, in the early 1970s he made his first serious attempts at literary translation.  In subsequent years he has earned high praise for his versions of Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Vicente Aleixandre, novelists Fernando Alegría and Ariel Dorfman, and such internationally acclaimed poets and prose writers as Julio Cortázar, Mahmoud Darwish, Raymond Queneau, Ernesto Cardenal, César Vallejo and Luis Cernuda, among others, and been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Lambda Literary Award for his translation of Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda.

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