A reading & conversation with luis negrón and Suzanne Jill Levine

Luis Negrón was born in the city of Guayama, Puerto Rico, in 1970. He studied journalism and has written film reviews for major Puerto Rican periodicals including Claridad and El Poeta. Negrón’s work explores the complex intricacies that come with being Latino and identifying as part of the LGBT spectrum, as well as what connects them to others. He has worked extensively in the queer arts community in Puerto Rico, including a founding role in Producciones Mano Santa, which has sponsored cultural and artistic productions over the last ten years. He co-edited Los Otros Cuerpos, an anthology of queer writing from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican diaspora. Negrón’s work won him the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction at the 26th Lambda Literary Awards in 2014, the first translated work to do so.

Distinguished Professor at the University of California and noted translator of Latin American literature by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar and Manuel Puig, Suzanne Jill Levine is Director of Translation Studies at UCSB. A poet and also the author of numerous critical and scholarly works, her books include Untranslatability Goes Global: The Translator’s Dilemma (Routledge, 2018), The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Graywolf Press and Dalkey Archive) and Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (Farrar Straus & Giroux) Among her latest translations is Eduardo Lalo’s USELESSNESS, for the University of Chicago Press, which came out Fall 2017.

The 2018 Lecture Series in Literary Translation is sponsored by the Department of World Languages & Literatures and the College of Arts & Sciences in conjunction with XL 540 - Theory and Practice of Literary Translation. Taught by William Waters, Professor of German and Comparative Literature