Otrarse

Ladino Poems

Juan Gelman, Ilan Stavans

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780826366795
• eBook ISBN: 9780826366801
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

One of Latin American’s most important poets of the twentieth century, Juan Gelman (1930–2014) spent much of his life in exile from his native Argentina during the Dirty War. Gelman was a child of Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian immigrants, and a significant, seldom recognized portion of his poetry dealt with Jewish themes. He established a dialogue across time with Santa Teresa de Ávila and San Juan de la Cruz, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystical poets whose ancestry was also Jewish. He rewrote portions of the Bible, medieval Hebrew poetry, and even taught himself Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews, and wrote a book of poems in it.

In this bilingual volume, celebrated scholar Ilan Stavans retraces Gelman’s regard for these poetic ancestors, translating into English his Jewish oeuvre by carefully preserving the Hebrew, Spanish, and Ladino echoes of the originals. The result is historically accurate and artistically exhilarating, repositioning Gelman as a major Jewish writer of the last century.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction. Becoming Sefardí
• Part One. Quotes (from Citas [1982])
• Part Two. Commentaries (from Comentarios [1982])
• Part Three. Com/positions (from Com/posiciones [1986])
• Part Four. Letter to My Mother (from Carta a mi madre [1989])
• Part Five. Lo judío and Spanish-Language Literature (1992)
• Part Six. Dibaxu (Dibaxu [1994])
• Part Seven. Worth It (from Vale la pena [2001])
• Notes
• Index of First Lines