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Ilan Stavans (born Ilán Stavchansky, 1961) is a Mexican-born Jewish-American writer and academic. He writes and speaks on American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures. He is the author of Quixote (2015) and a contributor to the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010). He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans, which ran from 2001 to 2006.
After living in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, Stavans immigrated to the United States in 1985, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1994. He earned a master's degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a PhD from Columbia University.
Stavans's work includes both scholarly monographs, such as The Hispanic Condition (1995), and , as in his graphic book Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000).
Stavans has edited 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.
His autobiography is entitled On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2001). He is best known for his investigations of language and culture. His love for lexicography is evident in his memoir, Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion (2005).
He has written influential essays on the Mexican comedian, Mario Moreno ("Cantinflas"); the lampooner José Guadalupe Posada, the Chicano leader César Chávez, and the Tejano singer Selena. He wrote a book about the board game Lotería! (with Teresa Villegas), which includes his own poems. Stavans was featured in one of the Smithsonian Q&A books.
His work explores 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 published by the University of New Mexico Press. His anthology, The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature (2005), received a National Jewish Book Award. In his The Inveterate Dreamer: Essays and Conversations on Jewish Culture (2001), he explores Jewish writing in every major language, including variations such as Yiddish, Ladino, and others. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.
He has been influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Wilson, and Walter Benjamin. (In his autobiography, Stavans says that in the early stages of his career, in order to find his own style, he burned his collection of dozens of Borges's books, p. 9.) He has written a biography of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, a Chicano lawyer. He wrote a book-long meditation on Mexican poet Octavio Paz. He wrote a preface in Spanglish to Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi.
He wrote a biography, Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (2010), the first of two planned volumes. Stavans traces the artistic development of Márquez from childhood to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish in 1967 (it was translated by Gregory Rabassa and published in English in 1970).
In A Critic's Journey (2009), Stavans address three cultures: Jewish, American, and Mexican. It includes pieces on writing On Borrowed Words, the legacy of the Holocaust in Latin America, the growth of Latino studies in the U.S. academy, Stavans's relationship with The Jewish Daily Forward, and translation in the shaping of Hispanic culture.Glinter, Ezra (2009-12-09). " Seduced by Stavans" review. The Forward. Retrieved 2023-09-06. He also includes pieces on writers Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodríguez, Isaiah Berlin, and W. G. Sebald, and close readings of Don Quixote and the oeuvre of Roberto Bolaño.
He describes various distinctive varieties of Spanglish, such as Cubonics (Cuban-American), Dominicanish (Dominican-American), Nuyorican (Puerto Rican in New York), and Chicano (Mexican American). He 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. Stavans studies Spanglish by making comparisons with Black English and with Yiddish, as well as Yinglish (a type of Yiddish spoken by Jewish immigrants to the United States and their children). And he reflects on the cultural similarities between Spanglish and jazz, rap, hip-hop, and graffiti.
In 2002, Stavans published a Spanglish translation of the first chapter of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia. 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. (2025). 9781349539628 ISBN 9781349539628
The Norton Anthology was deemed an "essential source for academic libraries". It was reviewed by The Boston Globe, Smithsonian, the American Book Review, World Literature Today, Literal, and NPR's On Point. Erica Jong said "Ilan Stavans has spread a feast of Latino literature before us." Cornel West called it "an instant classic." And Felipe Fernández-Armesto of University of Notre Dame stated: "Imaginatively conceived, painstakingly executed, stunningly broad, profoundly stirring, endlessly engaging, this book can change the way the world thinks about America and the way Americans think about themselves." It was also criticized for his subjective selection; there were few authors born in Central America.
Stavans also coedited The FSG Book of Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry, (2011) a 728 page volume that contextualizes the history of Latin American poets, including José Martí, Rubén Darío, César Vallejo, Oswald de Andrade, Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra, Nicanor Parra, Gabriela Mistral, Luis Palés Matos, Octavio Paz, Giannina Braschi, and Roberto Bolaño.
In Love and Language (2007), Stavans and translator Verónica Albin discuss the way the word "love" has changed through the ages. In Knowledge and Censorship (2008), Stavans explains the "acquisition of knowledge in multi-ethnic environments, the role that Dictionary play in the preservation of memory, the function of libraries in the Information Age, and the uses of censorship." Mordecai Drache, who writes for Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, discusses with Stavans the Bible as a work of literature in With All Thine Heart (2010). Steven G. Kellman published The Restless Ilan Stavans: Outsider on the Inside (2019), the first book-length study of the author and his work (Latinx and Latin American Profiles, Pittsburgh).
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