Ilan Stavans Quotes

What I look for in the classics is a message that is reinvented every time a new reader opens it. Along with the author, it is the role of the introducer and artist to make a case for that fresh take.

I don't think Latinos are a separate nation in the U.S. 'We are entering, belonging and sharing that melting pot with many other minority groups.

I tell my students that education isn’t about facts. It isn’t about theories, either. It is about tracking your thoughts, about witnessing how stories are formed in your mind. It is about allowing the mind not to be clogged, about letting it see not what it does but how it does it. The rules of criticism are the same as the rules of other types of literature. These rules boil down to one: finding the right words to tell the right narrative at the right time. Nothing else matters.

Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, argued that the theme of the twentieth century was the color line. In my view, the theme of the twenty-first century is immigration. Everything rotates around it: climate change, Covid-19, populism from Trump to other “aspirational” dictators, global finance, etc.

it is essential that we recognize that in the conquering efforts of the American English language, there is also a cemetery, a series of silences of other languages that have succumbed in the process.

I feel Noah’s ark, the Tower of Babel, the story of Abraham’s calling, Isaac’s Akedah, and Jacob’s ordeal and Moses’ liberation odyssey are imprinted in my DNA. I come from a Jewish-Mexican family in which culture was a form of religion. If pressed, I confess not to remember a specific moment during which I read Genesis. But that’s what the classics are: we get them not through reading but by osmosis.

An accessible language is a language that is beautiful. It is a language of understanding, not of pretension. To be accessible is to write not from Mount Sinai but from below, where the people are. The critic has the exact same words (in English, there are close to a million, according to the editors of the OED) available to write poetry, fiction, theater, autobiography, et cetera.

Without the classics, we are a tabula rasa: we have no memory. We not only open the classics to re-create the past; we also use them to calibrate the present.

we are currently in the midst of reimagining the classics, making the canon more expansive, less white and Eurocentric. Some titles fall off the shelf as others arrive. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, is, it appears to me, less current than it was a few decades ago. I taught it a couple of years ago, and students found plenty to fault and that is difficult to justify these days. At the same time, the work of immigrant writers—I love the novels by Viet Thanh Nguyen, for instance—is opening new vistas. This is as it should be. Literature, at first sight, might feel static, but it is just the opposite: an organic expression of a particular time and place.

It was only when I was a newly arrived Mexican immigrant in New York that I came to terms with Yiddish. It happened in a rather unexpected way, as I became exposed to the mixing of Spanish and English (called Spanglish today) in the subway and on the street, on TV, and on the radio. At first that barbaric hybrid, neither here nor there, made me cringe. My beloved Spanish language was being contaminated by an onslaught of Anglicisms. Should I do something to stop the pollution? However, I soon came to recognize that "a new Yiddish" was emerging in the United States, this time among Latinos, a vehicle of communication that depended on jazzy, never-ending code switching, just as Yiddish had done between Hebrew and German plus a variety of Slavic tongues. Yiddish automatically regained a dominant place for me. I not only wanted to reclaim its status, for me and others, but also to study its history, its evolution, in order to measure the potential of Spanglish.

The relationship we develop with a classic is like a lifelong friendship: it goes through ups and downs. Whenever we reopen the book, we are different, and, as a result, what we read is too. This, I think, is another definition of a literary classic: like a mirror, it reflects what is in front of it.

The best conditions for fine criticism to emerge are rather simple: an atmosphere where ideas and stories aren’t in opposition but in partnership, where the act and art of thinking becomes a compelling narrative not about a particular point but about life itself.

Reading a classic, I believe, ought to entail an element of foreignness...Classics are windows into an epoch, not only in content but in form.

Translators have always been agents of change. The Muslim translators of the School in Toledo, in the twelfth century, for example, and later on under Alfonso El Sabio, brought Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Hippocrates into Europe. Or Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Without these translators, there would not be a connection with the classical past.

In Mexico, I was a Jew. In the U.S., I became a Mexican, but all these dichotomies helped me to see that you can be an outsider and an insider simultaneously. You become a member of another minority, but not fully. Here I'm a Mexican in the U.S. I'm a Latino. I'm a Jew. I'm an American.