A Modern Argentinian Poet’s Versions of Classical Sephardi Poems

On a day of grave news like today, it’s good to be able to end with a bit of poetry. The Argentine Jewish poet Juan Gelman (1930-2014), during a dark period in his country’s history, found himself drawn to the Jewish religious and literary tradition, and especially to the great works Spanish Jewry—from medieval poets like Samuel ha-Nagid to the 16th-mystic Isaac Luria. As Ilan Stavans explains, “Gelman, from the 1980s onward, rewrote scores of these sources in his own style. He wasn’t interested in translating them; his objective was to appropriate them flat out, projecting their echoes into our modern sensibility.” Gelman, a native Yiddish speaker, even studied Ladino and wrote a series of poems in that language.