"His Jew is Sephardic": Juan Gelman`s Ladino

Argentine Ashkenazi poet Juan Gelman destabilizes notions of fixed identity and breaks down dichotomic divisions of ethnic origins as he gradually rewrites himself as a Sephardic Jew at the very moment when he most identifies as a Jew. I read Gelman’s bilingual Ladino-Spanish collection Dibaxu, placing this work in the context of Gelman’s larger poetic creation, as Dibaxu is the culmination of his rewritings of Spanish canonical authors, such as the mystical poets San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Ávila. I focus on the “process of self-Sephardization” that, I contend, is initially triggered by Gelman’s historical condition as a political exile, and then fed by his translation and rewriting of canonical medieval Spanish Hebrew poets, such as Yehuda Halevy and Ibn Gabirol. He proceeds in a linguistic “excavation” of the many layers in the Spanish language, and, through the language and its main texts, he writes himself as a Sephardic Jew. Gelman does not turn to the major language and major forms. Rather, in opposition to an oppressive regime with which his language is associated, Gelman makes a deterritorializing move and radically assumes a new language: the Jewish, exilic and minor Ladino.