Ilan Stavans is one of the foremost Latino scholars and here his best essays are collected into one volume. These beautifully written pieces explore the breadth of contemporary Latino-American culture, depicting and analyzing what he calls "life in the hyphen". Illustrations.

For twenty years, Ilan Stavans has been translating poetry from Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, Georgian, and other languages. His versions of Borges, Neruda, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ferreira Gullar, Raúl Zurita, and dozens of others have become classics. This volume, which includes poems from more than forty poets from all over the world, is testimony to a life dedicated to the pursuit of beauty through poetry in different languages. “Lightning from the Stable” by Elizabeth Schön (Venezuela, 1921–2007) You don’t choose the abyss, the chaos, the nothingness They reach you in water running slowly for you not to be surprised by the absence of matter around you near the light of the soul calling the wing’s passing flap of the earth you live in.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The United States of Mestizo is a powerful manifesto attesting to the fundamental changes the nation has undergone in the last half-century. Writer Ilan Stavans meditates on how the cross-fertilizing process that defined the Americas during the colonial period--the racial melding of Europeans and indigenous peoples--foretells the miscegenation that is the most salient profile of America today. If, as W.E.B. DuBois once argued, the twentieth century was defined by a color fracture at its core, Stavans believes the twenty-first will be shaped by a multi-color line that will make us all a sum of parts.

Presents a diverse sample of twentieth century Latin American poems from eighty-four authors in Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino, Spanglish, and several indigenous languages with English translations on facing pages.

Surprising readers again and again, cultural critic Ilan Stavans creates a dialogue with Vernica Albin to explore love in its many variations.