Inside a theater of words with Ilan Stavans.

• Author: Agosin, Marjorie
• Position: Mexican-born writer and translator

A MULTIFACETED MEXICAN-BORN WRITER AND TRANSLATOR EXPLORES ISSUES OF IDENTITY, RELIGION, AND LANGUAGE FROM A UNIQUELY BICULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

The narrative and critical writings of Ilan Stavans are unusual not only because he is a young man but also because of his versatile and thoughtful approach, as a Mexican writer in Spanish and English who translates his own material, as a Hispanic in the United States, and as a Latin American Jew teaching at Amherst College, in Massachusetts.

Stavans is unquestionably one of the most prolific writers in Latin America and perhaps in the United States. He combines cultural dialogue with reviews and essays that appear in The Nation and on the editorial pages of the Boston Globe and Washington Post. He is also a fine anthologist and creator of original texts.

Stavans says that his decision to become a writer was based on two fears: of his father's profession as an actor and an incalculable horror of death. He had grown up in the shadow of his father, he says, spotlighted against a theatrical backdrop. Yet he believes that "theater is the most human of artistic expressions but also the most ethereal and ephemeral: like a rite of initiation, it is born and dies within the space of a performance. In literature contact with the public is tangential, indirect: Your reader is rarely with you in the present, existing instead in the future."

Currently Stavans is writing a nontraditional novel about his father. Its central theme is the invisible frontier between theater and life, truth and lies, hope and despair. This is connected with his fear of death:

"I've been preoccupied with death ever since I was a child," he says, "not as a moment of unbearable grief or the instant when we're suddenly hurled into the abyss but as the total obliteration of being. To cease to exist, to know that every undertaking, every desire of mine will come to nothing is overwhelming. The only way to contend with death is through literature," he continues, "by making sure that what I do will leave a mark, that it will have meaning for someone else."

For Stavans, writing is synonymous with salvation. Although it is random salvation, a game of chance, it eases his anguish nonetheless. And he is a prolific writer because, frankly, he has so far found no better way of employing his time and calming his fears.

Stavans has written a novella, Talia en el cielo, and a major collection of stories, La pianista manca, both of which were published in English as one volume entitled The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories (University of New Mexico, 1996). In this book he discusses his bicultural status, which enables him to "be" different persons at the same time because of his ability to write in two languages and to acquire authentic identities in both. Stavans describes this collection as short "stories and novellas I wrote before the age of thirty. It is hard for me to discern a connecting thread, though others have done so. One of the stories, "The Invention of Memory," emerged all of a piece in a night or two after I had read a couple of books by the Russian neurologist A. R. Luria. One was about a soldier who loses his memory in an accident and the other about a professional mnemonist.

His aim in writing these stories, he says, had been, again, to pay tribute to the theater as art and as a mirror of the mind. Stavans believes that the first attempts to explain the mechanisms whereby we remember or forget facts and experience date to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when people like Giulo Camillo Delminio visualized memory as a theater, with proscenium, antechambers, balconies, and scenery.

The prevailing mood of The One-Handed Pianist is ambiguity, with magic and dread as its themes...