Archaeology of the Language / Archaeology of the Self

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.