Ilan Stavans - Influence

Influence

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, and 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 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.