“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
Description
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. Gelman was a child of Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian immigrants, and a significant, seldom recognized portion of his 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 also Jewish. He rewrote portions of the Bible, medieval Hebrew poetry, and even taught himself Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews, and wrote a book of poems in it.
In this bilingual volume, celebrated scholar Ilan Stavans retraces Gelman’s regard for these poetic ancestors, translating into English his Jewish oeuvre by carefully preserving the Hebrew, Spanish, and Ladino echoes of the originals. The result is historically accurate and artistically exhilarating, repositioning Gelman as a major Jewish writer of the last century.
Reviews
“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
“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
“Ilan Stavans has produced a major work of translation and commentary, bringing to the English language the incomparable poetry of Juan Gelman, whose life of exile and loss gave him the intimate knowledge to write about Sephardic memory as no other modern poet has done.”—Ruth Behar, author of Across So Many Seas
![Autobiography of a Face [Thirtieth Anniversary Edition] - 3 Dec 2024](https://ingress-cdn.pressreader.com/imageserver/v1/image/books/15059d58-a0db-4486-b90f-802d2ec1a915?width=163)
