Otrarse
Ladino Poems
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. A significant, seldom-acknowledged portion of Gelman’s 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 Jewish. He rewrote poetic portions of the Bible as well as medieval Hebrew poetry. Gelman even taught himself Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews, and wrote a volume of poems in it.
In this bilingual volume, celebrated scholar Ilan Stavans retraces Gelman’s admiration for these poetic ancestors, translating into English his Jewish oeuvre by carefully maintaining the Hebrew, Spanish, and Ladino echoes of the originals. The result is at once historically accurate and artistically exhilarating, repositioning Gelman as a major Jewish writer of the last century.
“Ilan Stavans’s Gelman is extraordinary.…We are in the presence of something marvelous: one of our best critical minds here introduces one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating poets, whose own journey was a conversation with poetics across the boundaries of time and space.…Stavans gently but with much nuance transforms our North American perspective on the Jewish presence in Spanish-language literature.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
“Juan Gelman was a fierce, dogged, and imaginative Latin American poet in search of justice and reparation, a poet at war with Argentina’s junta, who remembered the disappeared and lodged poems that will not be forgotten. Ilan Stavans has done us a tremendous service by recreating these Ladino poems, demonstrating that Gelman was also a deeply Jewish poet of exile, a spiritual writer in conversation with the Hebrew Bible, with the great medieval Jewish poets and Christian mystics. These marvelous translations show that Gelman’s poems are righteous, but they also burn with a mystic fever.”—Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry
“I have long considered Juan Gelman as one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language of our time, and this anthology—with many verses I had never read before—confirms that certainty. In Otrarse: Ladino Poems, he sweetens the multitude of his own exiles by finding in a past that others have already partly written the road of return that can lovingly console us for all that we have lost and continue to seek, over and over, to regain.”—Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum
One of Latin America’s most distinguished and influential contemporary poets, Juan Gelman (1930–2014) is the author of more than two dozen collections of poetry and an assortment of essay volumes. A vocal, transformative human-rights activist, he is the recipient of Argentina’s National Literature Prize and Spain’s Premio Cervantes, the most prestigious award in the Spanish language. Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the cofounder and publisher of Restless Books, and the academic director of the Great Books Summer Program. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, his work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted into film, theater, television, and radio.
