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On Becoming a ‘Beaner’: A Mexican American Story

By Ilan Stavans

‘Mexicans are the scum of the earth,” a student of mine said after being asked to describe the status of the immigrants at her South Carolina high school.Read More

Philip Roth’s New Novel About Philip Roth

By Ilan Stavans

Philip Roth has always been a conflicted warrior, balancing his high regard for his literary and sexual talents against a contempt for his own venality. His newest novel, “The Plagiarist,” is, yet again, a recapitulation of his overarching career, but the master has managed to revisit this well-worn ground in a shockingly new way.Read More

Tevye’s Many Daughters and Other Comparisons

By Ilan Stavans

Finding out exactly how many daughters the famous fictional dairyman Tevye actually has might be a tricky business, but no more so than seeking to discover how many English translations of “Tevye der Milhiker” are available today.Read More

Borges’s Zionist Bent: Newly Translated Poems

By Ilan Stavans

Jorge Luis Borges visited Israel twice. The first trip came at the invitation of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was in recognition of his philo-Semitism, and, in particular, his positive views on Israel. Borges had been active in Casa Argentina en Israel-Tierra Santa, a project that sought to build an Argentine cultural center in Jerusalem. He also had been the first to write about Israel in the prestigious intellectual magazine Sur in 1958. In the 1970s, in an autobiographical essay published in The New Yorker, Borges stated:Early in 1969, invited by the Israeli government, I spent ten very exciting days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I brought home the conviction of having been in the oldest and the youngest of nations, of having come from a very living, vigilant land to a half-asleep nook of the world. Since my Geneva days, I had always been interested in Jewish culture, thinking of it as an integral element of our so-called Western civilization, and during the Israeli-Arab war of a few years back I found myself taking immediate sides. While the outcome was still uncertain, I wrote a poem on the battle. A week later, I wrote another on the victory. Israel was, of course, still an armed camp at the time of my visit. There, along the shores of Galilee, I kept recalling these lines from Shakespeare: Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago, were nail’d, For our advantage, on the bitter cross. Actually, there is a total of three poems on Israel in Borges’s collection “In Praise of Darkness” (1969). All were later included in his “Obras Completas” (1994) I don’t believe they have been rendered into English before. Herein are my versions. First, “To Israel”.Read More

Tropical Refuge

By Ilan Stavans

As early as 1935, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who led the Dominican Republic from 1930 through 1961, suggested that his country would welcome as many as 100,000 refugees from Europe. It might seem ironic that Trujillo, known for his repressive regime, would invite Jews to the island, promising them religious freedom, but in this instance, it’s just one irony among many.Read More


 

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