Talk:Ilan Stavans

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[edit] Name

Why is this Ilan rather than Ilán? - Jmabel | Talk 03:37, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your question. When I started working with Ilan, I used the tilde when I wrote to him in Spanish. However, he prefers the Hebrew transliteration without the tilde. "Ilan" means palm tree in Hebrew. Vero 70.240.248.210 22:22, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. By the way, "~" is a tilde; "´" is an acute accent. - Jmabel | Talk 20:56, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Tienes toda la razón. The ~ is also called a swung dash when it is placed before a word (instead of over a letter).... In order to keep the peace, let's talk about diacritics instead of tildes :-) Happy New Year. Vero

[edit] Unreferenced

Much of this article is unreferenced, and reads like an autobiography or press release. Indeed, much of it has been written by Veronica Albin, a close collaborator of Ilan Stavans's. It would be good to have some sources, and for the tone of the article to become somewhat more encyclopedic. --Jbmurray 12:58, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

The external links list needs to be trimmed, though some of the trimming could be accomplished as part of the sourcing task; that is, some of the links would meet the criteria of sources for statements in the article, in which case they could be incorporated into inline footnote and removed from the "External links" segment. Lawikitejana 06:03, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

This entry on Stavans reads like a dust jacket promotion. He may have been critiized for being white and Jewish and trying to represent US Hispanic culture, but he has also and much more profoundly been criticized for passing himself off as a great public intellectual when he is a know-nothing whose work is riddled with basic errors and simplistic stereotypes. His introduction to an anthology of Ruben Darío's poetry famously asserts that the Nicaraguan writer's health deteriorated quickly after the first world war when Darío died in 1916 -- Roberto González Echevarraría cleverly points out this and many other factual lapses in his review of Stavan's introduction. In the category of self-promotion, this Wikipedia article uses the passive voice to indicated that a collection of Stavan's work came out in the "Essential Ilán Stavans," but doesn't mention that this was a self-edited volume published before Stavans was fourty years old -- more than a tiny bit of hubris. Finally, in the area of simplistic stereotypes, many prominent U.S. Latino writers (eg Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz) have been highly critical of the way Stavans addresses bilingualism and code-switching; there is nothing more meaningless in that sense than Stavan's moronic rendition of the opening of Don Quixote into an artificial, Stavanesque mixture of Spanish and English with no social or literary reference. He is an academic with no academically vetted publications and a public intellectual with no public constituency but he has pushed his way into the publishing world and from there into the cultural media with almost no one pausing to ask what the value of his work is. Defghi 9:01, 7 December 2007 (CST) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Defghi (talk • contribs)