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Knowledge and Censorship Summary:By Ilan Stavans, Veronica Albin
This volume collects four sharp philosophical essays by Ilan Stavans on the acquisition of knowledge in multi-ethnic environments, the role that dictionaries play in the preservation of memory, the function of libraries in the electronic age, and the uses of censorship. In the second part of the volume, Verónica Albin engages Stavans in a series of four conversations in which he expounds on the arguments he developed in the essays.
C O N T E N T S Preface xi Part 1 Four Meditations One The Process Glitch 3 Two Wor(l)ds 9 Three Stealing Books 15 Four Keeping My Mouth Shut 23 Part 2 Four Interviews (with Verónica Albin) Five Knowledge 29 Six Dictionaries 55 Seven Libraries 95 Eight Censorship 127 Index 165PREFACE In the fall of 2006 Gabriella Georgiades, known as Ella among friends, the humanities editor at Palgrave Macmillan in New York, envisioned including between two covers three interviews I made with Ilan Stavans. They revolved around the provocative topics of language, translation, silence, and censorship. She contemplated a fourth dialogue devoted to knowledge, thus rounding out the concept of how humans acquire and disseminate information. In addition, she suggested supplementing these four interviews with four brief, first-person meditations she read by Stavans, which were unified by a single motif: the quest for individual freedom in society, especially as it pertains to freedom of speech, belief, and action. In the preface to Love and Language (Yale University Press, 2007), I describe how I first met Stavans at a conference of the American Translators Association in Toronto, where he was delivering the Marilyn Gaddis Rose lecture. To what I’ve already said in that preface, I would like to add that I became interested in Stavans in part because he is still very much the urchin from Copilco we saw in On Borrowed Words. To this day, Stavans crosses the street where he shouldn’t, plays with his food, and changes the rules of the game when xii Preface you least expect it. But you can’t really spank him—or at least not every time—because somehow, without anyone noticing, he often manages to make a point no one else had yet made. Stavans is a bit of an imp and that pixyish attitude makes exploring the world of ideas with him a great deal of fun. When you travel with him, you trade the comfort of an Ivory Tower office for an uncertain perch on that precarious aerie on the topmast of some caravel, dizzy with the knowledge that he’s already thrown the charts overboard and you may very well get blown off the map. But let me expand on the inception of Knowledge and Censorship. Stavans and I got together for dinner in Houston in November 2004 without knowing each other well at all. While the hors d’oeuvre was being served, I realized that we were both hooked on dictionaries, each owning several hundred and each having authored one, and written and lectured extensively on them both formally and informally. By the time dessert came around, we agreed in that the dictionary is the embodiment of knowledge just as much as it is an instrument of censorship. In other words, there could not be a meaningful discussion of lexicons without a thorough exploration of the flow, and interruption, of information. As soon as I embarked on this first interview with Stavans, I knew I had a book in hand. That book—it turned out to be two plus a chapter on language and empire for Vanderbilt University Press—would revolve around freedom, identity, ethnicity, and knowledge. I got down to work immediately and was in constant touch via phone, fax, snail mail, and e-mail. Stavans and I talked to friend and foe all over the world, we picked our students’ brains, we read and surfed voraciously, and exchanged not only books and scholarly Preface xiii papers but also off-the-wall URLs, trivia, and cultural tidbits we remembered from our having grown up in Mexico City in the 1960s. We met in person as often as our schedules allowed. We made it a point to do so in cities we knew well (New York, Amherst, Houston, Mexico City) but in places in those cities where at least one of us, and preferably both, had never been. The purpose of this requirement was to learn something from the place we had selected as well as from the conversation of that day. We talked, and looked, and pondered in museums dedicated to strange obsessions, in little known art spaces and galleries, in libraries, in cemeteries, in lecture halls, or meeting rooms where topics we thought might have a bearing on what we set out to do were being discussed, and we even met in a hospital emergency room in the largest medical center in the world just to see what kinds of things were being said, what kinds of things held back. We let the eclectic venues guide and inspire us. It was outside the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, for instance, that the topic of silence, one that has occupied Stavans for decades, first emerged. And that topic led us to freedom of speech, and that to freedom of action and belief, a topic that Neal Sokol began exploring in Eight Conversations, specifically focusing on the influence Isaiah Berlin had on Stavans. That influence manifests itself in these playful pages. The connection between the reflections and interviews is deliberately understated. The former are impressionistic, offering a sense of Stavans’s rambunctious mindset. In contrast, in the latter I attempted to expand on them by pushing him to explore a particular topic from myriad perspectives. For instance, in “The Process Glitch” he mentions that in xiv Preface the English language there are two words for the same concept: freedom and liberty. Are they one and the same? In the interview on dictionaries, he delved into the duality. And he returns to it in his discussion on the censorship and the writer, where he talks about John Stuart Mill and Nadine Gordimer, among others. Therein, in a nutshell, a map to his mind: expansive, centrifugal, dithyrambic. When Ella Georgiades took a maternity leave, Luba Ostashevsky stepped in to steer the project to its completion. Both have been invaluable and we are indebted to them. And to Joanna Mericle, a blessing throughout the editorial process, a huge thank you. My gratitude goes to my indefatigable colleagues Martín F. Yriart and Eliezer Nowodworski for their counsel. Their knowledge is admirable, as free from any kind of censorship as is possible. I also appreciate the encouragement of the scores of readers who have sent insightful electronic messages in response to the work I’ve done with Stavans over the years. Finally, gracias to Neal Sokol for preparing the index. The material in this volume first appeared, in somewhat different form, in various periodicals, to whose generous editors, Gabe Bokor of the Translation Journal, and Robert Hartwell Fiske of The Vocabula Review, my gratitude is hereby acknowledged. (A note to curious readers: Three of the four dialogues included in Knowledge and Censorship—on “Dictionaries,” on “Censorship,” and on “Libraries” predate, but in may ways shaped, our conversations on love that led to Love and Language, a book on this most elusive of human emotions.) —Verónica Albin Please select one mirror to download
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