Ilan Stavans (born Ilan Stavchansky on April 7, 1961, in Mexico City) is a Mexican-American, essayist, lexicographer, cultural commentator, translator, short-story author, TV personality, and teacher known for his insights into American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures.
Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico to a middle-class Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement, his father Abraham was a popular Mexican soap opera star. Living in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, he ultimately immigrated to the United States in 1985. Upon completing his graduate education in New York City, he settled in New England where he lives with his wife, Alison, and his two sons, Joshua and Isaiah. His journey is the topic of his autobiography On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2001). He received a Master’s degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a Doctorate in Letters from Columbia University. He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans, which ran from 2001 to 2006.
He is best known for his investigations on language and culture. His love for lexicography is evident in Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion (2005).
Stavans's work is wide-ranging, and includes both scholarly monographs such as The Hispanic Condition (1995) and comic strips in the case of Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000). Stavans is editor of several anthologies including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998). A selection of his work appeared in 2000 under the title The Essential Ilan Stavans. In 2004, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Pablo Neruda’s birth, Stavans edited the 1,000-page-long The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. The same year he edited the 3-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories for the Library of America.
He has also displayed a strong interest in popular culture. Among other topics, he has written influential essays on the Mexican comedian, Mario Moreno ("Cantinflas")," the lampooner José Guadalupe Posada, the Chicano leader César Chávez, and the Tejana singer Selena, as well as a book about the board game Lotería! (with Teresa Villegas), which includes Stavans’s own poems. He was also featured in one of the Smithsonian Q&A books.
Since 1993 he has been on the faculty at Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture. He has also taught a various other institutions, including Columbia University. In 1997, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been the recipient of international prizes and honors, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile’s Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction.
He has portrayed Jewish-American identity as Eurocentric and parochial. He has been a critic of the nostalgia generated by life in the Eastern European shtetl of the 19th century. He is recognized for his explorations of Jewish culture in the Hispanic world. In 1994 he published the anthology Tropical Synagogues: Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers (1994). From 1997 to 2005 he edited the Jewish Latin America series at the University of New Mexico Press. And his anthology The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature (2005) was the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award. Some of his essays on Jewish topics are included in The Inveterate Dreamer. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.
His inspirations range from Jorge Luis Borges to Edmund Wilson and Walter Benjamin. (In his autobiography, Stavans recounts the episode, in the early stages of his career, when, in order to find his own style, he burned his collection of dozens of Borges’s books, p. 9.) He has written a small biography of the Chicano lawyer Oscar "Zeta" Acosta and a book-long meditation on Octavio Paz. In 2005, in a series of interviews with Neal Sokol called Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations, Stavans traces his beginnings, calls Hispanic civilization to task for its allergy to constructive self-criticism, discusses the work of Borges, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Sholem Aleichem, Gabriel García Márquez, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Octavio Paz, Samuel Johnson, Edward Said, Miguel de Cervantes, and others, and reflects on anti-Semitism and anti-Hispanic sentiment.
Stavans has devoted many years of study to the work of Gabriel García Márquez. His biography, Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years, slated for publication in 2010, is the first of two planned volumes. The biography traces Gabriel García Márquez's artistic development from childhood to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish in 1967 and its English translation by Gregory Rabassa in 1970. Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, has called this biography "an engaging, informative study tracking the small beginnings of a literary giant and his magnum opus. It is also a love story: that of an important contemporary critic and thinker with a writer, his life, and his text. Stavans enlightens us, not just about one literary figure, but about the culture and history of a whole hemisphere in a book that never feels plodding or overtly academic. Stavans is a magical writer himself."
In, A Critic’s Journey, published in 2009 by University of Michigan Press, Stavans writes about his life and work as a cultural critic. The book is a collection of pieces that brings together three cultures: Jewish, American, and Mexican. It includes pieces on writing On Borrowed Words, the Holocaust in Latin America, the growth of Latino studies in the U.S. academy, Stavans’ relationship with the Jewish Daily Forward, and translation in the shaping of Hispanic culture, as well as pieces on Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodríguez, Isaiah Berlin, and W. G. Sebald, asnd close readings of the Don Quixote and the oeuvre of Roberto Bolaño.
Since the late 1990s, Stavans has devoted his energy to reinvigorating the literary genre of the conversation not as a promotional tool but as a patient, insightful instrument to explore a them in intellectual depth. Neal Sokol interviewed Stavans in a book-long volume Eight Conversations (2004) on his Jewish and Latino heritage, translator Verónica Albin discussed the way the word “love” has changed through the age in the book Love and Language (2007) as well as on topic like libraries and censorship in Knowledge and Censorship (2008), and Canadian journalist Mordecai Drache (Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture) probes him on the Bible as a work of literature in With All Thine Heart (2010). In the U.S. Latino literary tradition, writers like Gloria Anzaldúa and Richard Rodriguez have also practiced the conversation as a meditative form.
Stavans’s short stories are included in The One-Handed Pianist (1996) and The Disappearance (2006). One of them, "Morirse está en hebreo," about Jewish life in Mexico at the time of the 2000 presidential election, which appeared in the later anthology, was turned into a movie directed by Alejandro Springall called "My Mexican Shivah." The film was praised by Martin Tsai in the New York Sun ("Lifetimes To Go in Old Mexico." August 29, 2008). Mr. Tsai writes "My Mexican Shivah offers so much profundity that almost every viewer can walk out of the theater with something to mull...Mr. Springall and screenwriter Jorge Goldenberg have so skillfully infused the film with an intriguing story, convincing performances, and a breezy pace that one nearly forgets that the action unfolds almost entirely within the confines of one house. The film's coda may be somewhat anticlimactic because the confrontations do not boil over as anticipated. But, like the rest of the film, it rings utterly true."
The themes in Stavans' fiction range from redemption and revenge to cultural authenticity and political activism. In "A Heaven Without Crows," he imagines Kafka's final letter to Max Brod, suggesting that maybe he shouldn't burn his ?uvre. "The One-Handed Pianist" deals with a rare disease affecting a piano concert player, impeding her the use of one hand. In "Xerox Man," written for the BBC, about an Orthodox Jewish thief of rare books, Stavans meditates on imperfection. And in "The Disappearance," about the kidnapping of a famous Jewish stage actor in the Low Countries, Stavans explores the perils of silence. "The Disappearance" serves as the basis of a play he created with the Double Edge Theater Company. The play's premiere was staged at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles on October 16, 2008 (see Mike Boehm's article "Seeking Haven on Earth." Los Angeles Times October 15, 2008).
His graphic novel "Mr. Spic Goes to Washington" (2008) was hailed by the writer Rigoberto González as "Stavans' latest contribution to a stellar career in literary troublemaking." Mr. González states in the El Paso Times (Texas) "Unlike "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," the Jimmy Stewart vehicle that inspires the title and premise of this book (a film that, incidentally, did not thrill Congress back in 1939 because of its depiction of a corrupt and self-absorbed branch of government), "Mr. Spic" inhabits a grittier version of this fantasy story line: There really is no place for such a pro-Latino agitator like him in Washington. And so his political career is cut short, though Stavans assures us that the ideas, dreams and visions of a pioneer do not vanish with his martyrdom." ("What If You Voted for the Vato?" El Paso Times October 19, 2008) Elaine Ayala writes in the San Antonio Express-News ""Mr. Spic" delivers Latino history lessons with comedic bows not only to Mr. Smith but Cervantes' Don Quixote, Woody Allen's "Zelig," JFK conspiracy theories, even Bill Clinton...The 110-page book is a quick, entertaining read that will appeal to a wider and younger audience than has read Stavans before. Fans of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" will enjoy its comedic value and caustic satire." ("Idealistic Mr. Spic Shocks and Provokes." San Antonio Express-News July 27, 2008)
His views on language are polemical in their approach to word and structure formation. Stavans believes that dictionaries and language academies are buffers whose improbable function is to provide continuity for a language, but suggests that such continuity, especially in the age of electronic communication, is fatuous. He accuses the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Madrid of colonialism, among other things. He has also studied the Iberian conquest of the Americas in the 16th century from a linguistic perspective. Translation, for Stavans, represents appropriation. He defined modernity as “a translated way of life” and has written and lectured on the role translators perform as communicating vessels across epochs and habitats.
He has been criticized by some academics and scholars who have taken issue with his formulation of US Latino identity and/or with his research in literary studies, for example, concerns regarding factual errors in his published output.
Allatson, Paul (2006). "Ilan Stavans's Latino USA. A Cartoon History (of a cosmopolitan intellectual)." Chasqui 35(1): 21—41. (Academic Journal)
Dalleo, Raphael and Elena Machado Sáez (2007). The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature. [1] New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (Book)
Flores, Juan (2000). From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity.[2] New York: Columbia University Press. (Book)
Luis, William (1997). Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP.
Sokol, Neal (2004). Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations (Book)
Machado Sáez, Elena (2009). "Reconquista: Ilan Stavans and Multiculturalist Latino/a Discourse." Latino Studies 7.4 (2009): 410—434. (Academic Journal)
Mendoza, Louis (2001). "On Buffaloes, Body Snatching, and Bandidismo: Ilan Stavans’s Appropriation of Oscar Acosta and the Chicano Experience." [3] Bilingual Review 26(1): 79—86. (Academic Journal) Scholar search
Modroño Garcia, Luz (2009). "Ilan Stavans, icono del seudointelectual norteamericano." Cuba Nuestra Digital [4] (Magazine Article)
Richardson, Lynda (1999). "How to Be Both an Outsider and an Insider; 'The Czar of Latino Literature and Culture' Finds Himself Under Attack." The New York Times.[5] (Newspaper Article)
(1998). "'Living in the Hyphen' Between Latin and American." The Chronicle of Higher Education. [6] (Magazine Article)
(2009). "El esencial difamador Ilan Stavans/The Essential Slanderer Ilan Stavans." Vegamedia Press.com Source Cannot be Confirmed (Magazine Article)
