38 Facts About Ilan Stavans

Ilan Stavans was born on Ilan Stavchansky, 1961 and is an American writer and academic.

Ilan Stavans writes and speaks on American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures.

Ilan Stavans is the author of Quixote and a contributor to the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature.

Ilan Stavans was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans, which ran from 2001 to 2006.

Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico in 1961 to a middle-class Jewish family; his father's ancestors had immigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement.

Ilan Stavans earned a master's degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a PhD from Columbia University.

Ilan Stavans is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common.

Ilan Stavans has taught at various other institutions, including Columbia University.

Ilan Stavans's work is includes both scholarly monographs such as The Hispanic Condition, and comic strips, as in his graphic book Latino USA: A Cartoon History.

Ilan Stavans has edited anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories.

In 2004, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's birth, Ilan Stavans edited the 1,000-page-long The Poetry of Pablo Neruda.

Ilan Stavans's autobiography is entitled On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language.

Ilan Stavans is best known for his investigations of language and culture.

Ilan Stavans has written influential essays on the Mexican comedian, Mario Moreno ; the lampooner Jose Guadalupe Posada, the Chicano leader Cesar Chavez, and the Tejana singer Selena.

Ilan Stavans has received international prizes and honors for his writings, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile's Presidential Medal, and the Ruben Dario Distinction.

Ilan Stavans has been a critic of the nostalgia in this community for the past of the Eastern European shtetls of the 19th century.

Ilan Stavans's work explores Jewish culture in the Hispanic world.

Ilan Stavans's work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Ilan Stavans has been influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Wilson, and Walter Benjamin.

Ilan Stavans wrote a book-long meditation on Mexican poet Octavio Paz.

Ilan Stavans wrote a preface in Spanglish to Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi.

Ilan Stavans wrote a biography, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Early Years, the first of two planned volumes.

Ilan Stavans includes pieces on writers Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodriguez, Isaiah Berlin, and W G Sebald, and close readings of Don Quixote and the oeuvre of Roberto Bolano.

Ilan Stavans is a sociolinguist and who writes on Spanglish, a hybrid form of communication that merges Spanish and English.

Ilan Stavans edited a dictionary of Spanglish words called Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, which provides historical analysis of the development of this linguistic form and denotes Spanglish use in literary works by major Latino authors Piri Thomas, Giannina Braschi, Sandra Cisneros, and Junot Diaz.

Ilan Stavans describes various distinctive varieties of Spanglish, such as Cubonics, Dominicanish, Nuyorican, and Chicano.

Ilan Stavans defines differences across generational and geographical lines, stating that recent immigrants are prone to use a type of Spanglish that differs from that of second- or third-generation Latinos.

In 2002, Ilan Stavans published a Spanglish translation of the first chapter of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia.

Ilan Stavans stated that Spanglish is today's manifestation of "mestizaje," the mixture of racial, social, and cultural traits of Anglos and Latinos, similar to what occurred during the colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century.

Lipski holds that Ilan Stavans seems to view all code-switching as an act of creativity, which contradicts the linguistic understanding of spoken code-switching as a speech mode largely below conscious awareness and subject to basic syntactic restrictions.

Ilan Stavans' translations have been frequently cited in Spanish-speaking countries as evidence of the supposed degraded state of Spanish in the US.

Ilan Stavans served as general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, a 2,700-page compendium that includes more than two hundred authors and covers from the colonial period to the present time.

Ilan Stavans coedited The FSG Book of Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry, a 728 page volume that contextualizes the history of Latin American poets, including Jose Marti, Ruben Dario, Cesar Vallejo, Oswald de Andrade, Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra, Nicanor Parra, Gabriela Mistral, Luis Pales Matos, Octavio Paz, Giannina Braschi, and Roberto Bolano.

Ilan Stavans's works explores how dictionaries and language academies are buffers whose improbable function is to provide continuity for a language.

Ilan Stavans suggests that such continuity, especially in the age of rapid electronic communication, is fatuous.

Ilan Stavans accuses the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Madrid of colonialism of bias.

Ilan Stavans has studied the Iberian conquest of the Americas in the 16th century from a linguistic perspective.

Ilan Stavans defines modernity as "a translated way of life".