Poetic Sephardic Voices Emerging in Contemporary Latin American

Following Argentine poet Juan Gelman published poetry in a Ladino more than 20 years ago, contemporary Latin America remains both spatially and culturally fascinating form the respect of the Ladino, or Ladino-related, poetic works that are created in. In the proposed lecture, I shall present this phenomenon, focusing on a close reading of poets in whose works Sephardic memory is re-shaped into a contemporary existence based but not totally dependent upon the past.

A representative voice in this respect is that of Myriam Moscona. Writing in the Ladino of her grandparents who immigrated to Mexico from Bulgaria, she reacquires their vanished Sephardic world and makes it her own, carefully avoiding empty nostalgia by replacing it with a deep dialogue with the past that forms part of her identity.

Another fascinating example is the work of Chilean-American poet Marjorie Agosin, who comes from an Ashkenazi family and writes solely in Spanish, and yet the journey in the footsteps of the Sephardic ladies who lived along the shores of the Mediterranean for centuries is central to her work.

The Sephardim occupy a central place in the recent work of Brazil`s poet Moacir Amâncio. Ladino rarely penetrates Agosin and Amâncio`s poetry, and yet, it creates a strong sense that the contemporary Sephardic imagined existence grows out of their other languages, and symbolize a historical and mythical birth place – a process that will be focused on in my lecture.