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CORVALLIS, Ore. - A scholar from the University of California, Santa Barbara, will give the final lecture in the 2009-10 Horning Lecture Series at Oregon State University, discussing the work of writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Suzanne Jill Levine will speak on "Translation is Writing: Borges in/on Translation" on Thursday, May 27, beginning at 4 p.m. in OSU's Memorial Union Journey Room. Her talk is free and open to the public.

The lecture series has the theme, "Translation: Crossing Borders, Crossing Cultures."

Levine will illustrate how essential Borges' broad understanding of translation was to his writing - in nearly every essay, poem, review, prologue, and story he wrote from the 1920s through to the 1980s. Levine will highlight those four essays whose principal theme is translation - "Las dos maneras de traducer" (1926), "Las versions homéricas" (1932), "Los traductores de las 1001 noches" (1936), and "El enigma de Edward Fitzgerald" (1951) - as well as his noted work of fiction, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" (1939).

Levine is a leading translator of Latin American literature and professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UCSB, where she directs a translation studies doctoral program. Her scholarly and critical works include her award-winning literary biography "Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman" (FSG and Faber & Faber, 2000) and a groundbreaking book on the poetics of translation, "The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction."

Her many honors include National Endowment of the Arts and National Endowment of the Humanities fellowships and research grants, the first PEN USA West Prize for Literary Translation, the PEN American Center Career Achievement Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. She has just completed a five-volume project as general editor of the works of Borges for Penguin Classics.

The Horning Lecture Series is supported by the Horning Endowment in the Humanities. For more information, contact the History Department at 541-737-8560 or visit www.oregonstate.edu/cla/history