Contemporary Voices in Ladino Poetry – April 21, 2016

• Thursday, April 21 at 6:30pm to 8:30pm
• Allen Hall, Room 221 – University of Oregon
  1020 University Street, Eugene, OR

Prof. Monique Balbuena, Clark Honors College, “Contemporary Voices in Ladino Poetry”

Departing from a rhetoric of death that surrounds any conversation about Ladino (vernacular Judeo-Spanish) today, Monique Balbuena will look at contemporary poetry in Ladino. She will observe the different poetic projects that the language has been used to carry, and the new values it has acquired. Because it is a diasporic language, the perspective taken in an initial survey is necessarily transnational, with the focus narrowing onto Latin America, that has proved a fertile ground for Ladino. The adoption of Latin American genres and translation of Latin American texts, as well as the history of oppression and dictatorships in the continent are part of the context in which the minor, diasporic and Jewish Ladino becomes an option for writers, poets and songwriters in the continent.

Monique Balbuena is Associate Professor of Literature in the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. She was a Harry Starr Fellow at Harvard in 2003-04 and a Frankel Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2010-11. Her book Homeless Tongues: Poetry & Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Fuente: calendar.uoregon.edu