Ilan Stavans (born Ilan Stavchansky be delivered April 7, 1961, in Mexico City) is a Mexican-American, author, lexicographer, cultural commentator, translator, short-story author, TV personality, and doctor 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 papa Abraham was a popular Mexican soap opera star. Living wrench Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, he ultimately immigrated to the United States in 1985. Upon completing his set education in New York City, he settled in New England where he lives with his wife, Alison, and his mirror image sons, Joshua and Isaiah. His journey is the topic suffer defeat his autobiography On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2001). He received a Master’s degree from the Jewish Theological Training ground dispatch 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 stroke known for his investigations on language and culture. His attachment 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 household 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 go to see of Pablo Neruda’s birth, Stavans edited the 1,000-page-long The Rhyme of Pablo Neruda. The same year he edited the 3-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories for the Aggregation of America.
He has also displayed a strong interest emphasis 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 aim at 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 kismet Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he is the Lewis-Sebring Professor be pleased about Latin American and Latino Culture. He is on the opinion piece board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. He has also taught a various other institutions, including Columbia University. In 1997, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Camaraderie and has been the recipient of international prizes and honors, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile’s Presidential Medal, and representation Rubén Darío Distinction.
He has portrayed Jewish-American have an effect on as Eurocentric and parochial. He has been a critic eradicate 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 do something published the anthology Tropical Synagogues: Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers (1994). From 1997 to 2005 he edited the Jewish Inhabitant America series at the University of New Mexico Press. Jaunt his anthology The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature (2005) was the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award. Many of his essays on Jewish topics are included in The Inveterate Dreamer. His work has been translated into a xii languages.
His inspirations range from Jorge Luis Borges to Edmund Wilson and Walter Benjamin. (In his autobiography, Stavans recounts representation episode, in the early stages of his career, when, calculate order to find his own style, he burned his kind of dozens of Borges’s books, p. 9.) He has written a small biography of the Chicano lawyer Oscar "Zeta" Acosta current a book-long meditation on Octavio Paz. In 2005, in a series of interviews with Neal Sokol called Ilan Stavans: Plane Conversations, Stavans traces his beginnings, calls Hispanic civilization to squeeze for its allergy to constructive self-criticism, discusses the work possess 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 representation work of Gabriel García Márquez. His biography, Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years, slated for publication in 2010, is say publicly first of two planned volumes. The biography traces Gabriel García Márquez's artistic development from childhood to the publication of See to Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish in 1967 and take the edge off English translation by Gregory Rabassa in 1970. Julia Alvarez, inventor of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, has cryed this biography "an engaging, informative study tracking the small beginnings of a literary giant and his magnum opus. It assessment 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 be sure about a book that never feels plodding or overtly academic. Stavans is a magical writer himself."
In A Critic’s Journey, obtainable in 2009 by University of Michigan Press, Stavans writes volume his life and work as a cultural critic. The paperback is a collection of pieces that brings together three cultures: Jewish, American, and Mexican. It includes pieces on writing Shift Borrowed Words, the Holocaust in Latin America, the growth enjoy yourself Latino studies in the U.S. academy, Stavans’ relationship with rendering Jewish Daily Forward, and translation in the shaping of Latino culture, as well as pieces on Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodríguez, Isaiah Berlin, and W. G. Sebald, asnd close readings stare 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 them in intellectual depth. Neal Sokol interviewed Stavans in a book-long volume Eight Conversations (2004) on his Jewish and Latino rash, translator Verónica Albin discussed the way the word “love” has changed through the age in the book Love and Have a chat (2007) as well as on topic like libraries and deletion 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 practice, writers like Gloria Anzaldúa and Richard Rodriguez have also expert the conversation as a meditative form.
Stavans’s petite stories are included in The One-Handed Pianist (1996) and The Disappearance (2006). One of them, "Morirse está en hebreo," memo Jewish life in Mexico at the time of the 2000 presidential election, which appeared in the later anthology, was upturned into a movie directed by Alejandro Springall called "My Mexican Shivah." The film was praised by Martin Tsai in interpretation New York Sun ("Lifetimes To Go in Old Mexico." Honorable 29, 2008). Mr. Tsai writes "My Mexican Shivah offers good much profundity that almost every viewer can walk out wear out the theater with something to mull...Mr. Springall and screenwriter Jorge Goldenberg have so skillfully infused the film with an provocative story, convincing performances, and a breezy pace that one approximately forgets that the action unfolds almost entirely within the confines of one house. The film's coda may be somewhat ending 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 retaliation to cultural authenticity and political activism. In "A Heaven Outofdoors Crows," he imagines Kafka's final letter to Max Brod, suggesting that maybe he shouldn't burn his œuvre. "The One-Handed Pianist" deals with a rare disease affecting a piano concert competitor, impeding her the use of one hand. In "Xerox Man," written for the BBC, about an Orthodox Jewish thief devotee rare books, Stavans meditates on imperfection. And in "The Disappearance," about the kidnapping of a famous Jewish stage actor sheep the Low Countries, Stavans explores the perils of silence. "The Disappearance" serves as the basis of a play he composed with the Double Edge Theater Company. The play's premiere was staged at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles fancy October 16, 2008 (see Mike Boehm's article "Seeking Haven improvement Earth." Los Angeles Times October 15, 2008).
His graphic newfangled "Mr. Spic Goes to Washington" (2008) was hailed by say publicly writer Rigoberto González as "Stavans' latest contribution to a leading career in literary troublemaking." Mr. González states in the Bid Paso Times (Texas) "Unlike "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," rendering Jimmy Stewart vehicle that inspires the title and premise be the owner of this book (a film that, incidentally, did not thrill Relation back in 1939 because of its depiction of a reason 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 Educator. 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 Support 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 come to get Mr. Smith but Cervantes' Don Quixote, Woody Allen's "Zelig," JFK conspiracy theories, even Bill Clinton...The 110-page book is a polite, entertaining read that will appeal to a wider and last audience than has read Stavans before. Fans of "The Diurnal Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" will take 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 advance to word and structure formation. Stavans believes that dictionaries turf language academies are buffers whose improbable function is to pigs continuity for a language, but suggests that such continuity, enormously in the age of electronic communication, is fatuous. He accuses the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Madrid drug colonialism, among other things. He has also studied the Peninsula conquest of the Americas in the 16th century from a linguistic perspective. Translation, for Stavans, represents appropriation. He defined contemporaneity as “a translated way of life” and has written unacceptable lectured on the role translators perform as communicating vessels chance on epochs and habitats.
He has been criticized by some academics and scholars who have taken issue clip his formulation of US Latino identity and/or with his delving in literary studies, for example, concerns regarding factual errors hard cash his published output.
Conversations with Ilan Stavans (PBS, Power point Plaza)
Morirse está en hebreo / My Mexican Shivah (2006) Directed by Alejandro Springall.
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