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Monique Balbuena (University of Oregon): "Poetry in Ladino Today. New Verse in Old Language"

“Poetry in Ladino Today: New Verse in an Old Language”

The past decade or so has seen an upsurge in interest in Ladino, or vernacular Judeo-Spanish. Situated in a transnational trend of Ladino revival and a valorization of identity politics, a renewed creation in Ladino reveals different poetic projects which, in their turn, serve to express a variety of ways of constructing and expressing a contemporary Sephardic identity.

This presentation will discuss the current production in Ladino, focusing on contemporary poetry (in its transnational exchanges) and on the adoption of Latin American and other “foreign” genres into the Ladino repertoire. It will also touch upon the “bridging” or collaboration between Sephardic/Ladino and Latino artists.

Monique Balbuena is Associate Professor of Literature at Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. Balbuena is a translator and a scholar of comparative literature and Jewish studies. Her research interests lie in the relationship between language and identity; more pointedly, she is interested in how writers—usually multilingual writers—construct their identity through their choice of languages and intertexts. Doing comparative Jewish literatures, Balbuena has focused on literatures from North Africa (Maghreb) and Latin America. She has also given special attention to literatures by Sephardic Jews—roughly defined as those whose origins are in the Iberian Peninsula—and specifically to literature in Ladino, the Sephardic language par excellence.