And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again by Ilan Stavans

It is the other way around: we are scared and then we dream of a tiger. Years ago, an Indian friend told me that we don’t dream of a tiger and then feel scared. I seldom remember my dreams, but now I wake up disturbed in the middle of the night, not because of the images I witnessed in my dreams but because I feel that the emotions they’re conveying are raw, urgent. The texture in which they unfold is intense.

Ilan Stavans: My dreams lately have been more vivid that usual.

Stavans is the editor of the new anthology And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the COVID-19 Pandemic (Restless Books), which includes pieces by Lahiri, Halfon, and segments of an email correspondence that Stavans and New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson have held since the pandemic began. Lahiri was in Rome, Halfon in southern France, and Stavans in Cape Cod. How do immigrant writers respond to COVID-19? In what way has it affected their dreams? Has the understanding of the future also been recalibrated? This is an edited version of a Zoom conversation between Jhumpa Lahiri, Eduardo Halfon, and Ilan Stavans that took place on July 23rd, 2020.