Monique Balbuena

Homeless Tongues

Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Monique Rodrigues Balbuena is Associate Professor of Literature in the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Juli 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 239mm x 160mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 476g
• ISBN-13: 9780804760119
• ISBN-10: 080476011X
• Artikelnr.: 42794373

Autorenporträt

Monique Rodrigues Balbuena is Associate Professor of Literature in the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
This introduction first introduces poet Clarisse Nicoïdski as a Sephardic
poet who shifts languages and genres when she moves from French to Ladino,
and prose to poetry, when confronting the death of her mother, her people
and her culture. Then the introduction briefly presents Deleuze and
Guattari's formula for "minor literatures" and the counter-arguments this
book presents to it. The text then proceeds discussing basic concepts that
are central to the book and to the poets here discussed: genres of
Sephardic poetry, the Judeo-Spanish language, its development and its many
names, multilingualism and Jewish langauges, and Diaspora.
1Minor Literatures and Major Laments: Reading Sadia Lévy
chapter abstract
This chapter presents Sadia Lévy, an Algerian poet who attempted to
inscribe himself in the gallery of French Symbolists while writing in a
French enriched by infusions of Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish, activating
biblical and Kabbalistic genres in his poems. Lévy allows us to look at the
development of modernism from a different angle, and serves as an example
that will prompt changes in Jewish historical narrative, destabilizing
certain views of Jewish culture, more specifically about Sephardi and North
African Jews. Writing in French in colonial Algeria, Lévy makes us rethink
the boundaries that define a French and a Francophone author. Having
written one of the first Maghrebi novels in French, his precedence has gone
unrecognized because as a Jew, he is considered French-an ideological
exclusionary act that misses his ambivalent position and does not recognize
that the privilege of his French citizenship is more artificial than ever.
2At the Crossroads: Greece, Israel and Spain in Margalit Matitiahu's
Hebrew-Ladino Poetry
chapter abstract
Chapter 2, on Israeli contemporary poet Margalit Matitiahu, focuses on her
bilingual Hebrew-Ladino books-especially her first volumes, Kurtijio Kemado
and Alegrika. It discusses the critical reception of her work within Hebrew
and Ladino literatures and, observing that her readers and critics are for
the most part still divided across linguistic borders, offers a reading of
two poems in both their Hebrew and Ladino versions, with attention to the
specificities of the languages and their respective audiences, and
observing the poet's strategies of self-translation. This chapter also
brings to the foreground the politics of Jewish languages and questions the
concepts of diasporic and nationalist identities, pointing to a critique of
the nation and the attempted creation of a homogenizing national subject.
It also touches upon the place of the Shoah in Sephardic memory and
identity.
3Archaeology of the Language/Archaeology of the Self: Juan Gelman's Journey
to Ladino
chapter abstract
Chapter 3, about Argentine Ashkenazi poet Juan Gelman, destabilizes notions
of fixed identity and breaks down dichotomic divisions of ethnic origins as
it traces Gelman's gradual rewriting of himself as a Sephardic Jew at the
very moment when he most identifies as a Jew. It reads Gelman's bilingual
Ladino-Spanish collection Dibaxu as the culmination of his rewritings of
Spanish canonical authors. It focuses on the "process of
self-Sephardization," 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. He proceeds in a linguistic
"excavation" of the many layers in the Spanish language, and writes himself
as a Sephardic Jew. 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.
Conclusion: Wither
chapter abstract
The conclusion revisits the main arguments of the book and discusses new
developments and possibilities for the creative production in Ladino. It
seeks to turn the focus from the atmosphere of death that surrounds the
language to an acknowledgement, or even celebration, of Sephardim as
present-day, creative, living Jews.