Conference: “The New Faces of Ladino in Latin America Today: Language Revival and National Identity”

 

 

“The New Faces of Ladino in Latin America Today: Language Revival and National Identity”

Monique Balbuena, University of Oregon
January 27, 12pm
Alumni Center, 200 Fletcher
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

 

Spanyolit, or Ladino, the vernacular Judeo-Spanish, has been living its death sentence for quite a number of years. And yet, it has been the language of choice for a series of works appearing in different parts of the world: Latin America, the US, and Israel, to name a few. Balbuena examines the resurgence of Ladino in Latin America and its new and different uses by writers and popular artists, focusing on modern appropriations of the language in contemporary music and poetry. From new poetry in Ladino (including that by Ashkenazi writer Juan Gelman), to translations of foundational national poems (such as Martín Fierro, in Argentina), to the incorporation of Latin American genres into the Ladino repertoire (such as Argentine Tango), Balbuena will discuss the circumstances that make Ladino a compelling linguistic option to artists in the 21st century, as well as the construction of a specific Jewish, Sephardic, and Latin American identity.

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Monique Balbuena is Associate Professor of Literature in the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon. She works mostly on Latin American and North African Jewish Literatures, with a focus on multilingualism, poetics, and issues of nationalism and diaspora. Balbuena is among a handful of scholars doing literary studies on the corpus of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) texts. Her forthcoming book Homeless Tongues, Textual Identities: Poetry & Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora (Stanford) reads bilingual works of poets from Algeria, Israel and Argentina, who, she claims, express a hybrid, composite Sephardic identity, through a strategic choice of competing languages and intertexts. Their work also calls into question established notions of ethnic, literary and linguistic identity. Balbuena’s project at the Frankel Institute observes the contemporary uses of Ladino in Latin America. She is the co-editor of the special Latin American issue of the Journal of Jewish Identities, and among Balbuena’s publications are Poe e Rosa à Luz da Cabala (Imago, 1994), “Dibaxu: A Comparative Analysis of Clarisse Nicoïdski’s and Juan Gelman’s Bilingual Poetry”Romance Studies 27, 4 (2009), “Sepharad in Brazil: Between the Metaphorical and the Literal.” Modern Jewish Studies (Yiddish) 15, 1-2 (2007), “Symbolist Kinah? Laments and Modernism in the Maghreb,” Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies. Vol. 3. Jerusalem 2007, “Spanyolit in Latin America: An Old Language in the New World” Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: A Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies. Eds. Margalit Bejarano and Edna Aizenberg (Syracuse, forthcoming).

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