Juan Gelman, Dibaxu (selected poems)

Translator’s Introduction

What follows is a series of English translations of Juan Gelman’s (1930–2014) Dibaxu, a bilingual collection of twenty-nine love poems written originally in Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish (“Sefardí” in Gelman’s terms), accompanied by translations into modern Spanish by the author himself. In other words, there are two translators present here: Gelman, the self-translator who moves from his adopted tongue, Ladino, back into his native Spanish, and me, the translator who carries his verses over from the Spanish translations into English.

Although not published until 1994, Gelman composed Dibaxu between 1983 and 1985, while exiled in Europe. A lifelong leftist political activist, the poet was banished from his native Argentina in 1975 due to his involvement with the Montoneros, a guerrilla, left-wing Peronist organization. The year 1976 ushered in a period of collective horror and pain for Gelman and his compatriots. Although Gelman managed to escape political persecution under General Jorge Rafael Videla’s military dictatorship during the Guerra sucia (Dirty War, 1974–1983), Gelman’s son, Marcelo Ariel, along with his pregnant wife, María Claudia Iruretagoyena, were disappeared and extrajudicially murdered by the military’s right-wing death squads.

The multilingualism present in Dibaxu as well as Gelman’s deliberate choice to write in Ladino and then self-translate invites a reflection on language and, specifically, on the complex relationship between language and exile. For Gelman, Ladino, the language of the Sephardim, is a tongue that exists exclusively in exile. The diasporic language of Ladino carries histories of displacement, beginning with the Edict of Expulsion of Granada in 1492, which ordered the banishment of the Jews and Conversos from the kingdoms of Spain’s Catholic Monarchs. In his brief preface to Dibaxu, Gelman writes, “It was as if the extreme solitude of exile had pushed me to search for roots in language, the deepest and most exiled ones of language.” This quest, spurred by the unbearable pain of his personal expulsion, follows a downward trajectory as captured by the title of the collection, Dibaxu, which is Ladino for “debajo” or “beneath.” Gelman not only descends, plunging into the depths of sixteenth-century Spanish to uncover its substratum, Judeo-Spanish, but his self-translation into modern Spanish insists on a movement across as well, ultimately suturing the substrata through the common theme of exile. Gelman beseeches us to listen carefully to this dialogue, which defies geographical, temporal, spatial, and linguistic boundaries, traveling between “the two sounds” of displaced voices of the far past and of Gelman’s more recent past. The slashes that complete each poem emphasize the dialogical aspect of Dibaxu, inviting the reader to trail the narrative voice full of longing as it weaves in and out of the bilingual verses. If we dive beneath the romantic surface of the poems, we discover allegories of exilic discourse below the ostensible sensual longing, where dreams of a distant native land and mother tongue, of loved ones disappeared, are encoded in the figure of the beloved. The true genius of Gelman resides in his ability to craft a poetics of estrangement in order to achieve a disalienation of the self. Through a number of stylistic techniques including the feminization of masculine nouns, intentional grammatical errors in verbal conjugations, and unconventional syntax, Gelman distorts language so that his poetry may begin to articulate the ineffable and estranging violence of his world. Exile is an extreme form of alienation. The dispossessed subject is brutally confronted with the startling absence of a motherland and deafening silence of a mother tongue. In the poems of Dibaxu, Gelman radically distances himself from his native Spanish, his typical playground for language experimentation and grammar tricks, embracing Ladino instead as the site for his idiosyncratic poetic expression. Before he self-translates back into Spanish, the poet begins with a linguistic self-banishment, opting for the exilic tongue par excellence in order to circumvent the discourse and material violence of Argentina’s military dictatorship and regain control over the conditions of his own forced expropriation. Oddly, it is through his decision to write in Ladino, estranging himself further, that Gelman rediscovers the tenderness of language that speaks most immediately to the pain of his immense loss. Certain intrinsic aspects of Ladino such as the innate diminutives, the feminization of masculine words (“la calor” in Ladino versus “el calor” in Spanish in Poem VII), and the normalization of irregular verb constructions all reflect hallmarks of Gelman’s poetic oeuvre. The naturalization of the poet’s most salient rhetorical tricks in Ladino highlights the extent of Gelman’s estrangement from Spanish and his discovery of an adopted mother tongue in Ladino. This exilic language, which invites the natural expression of Gelman’s previously “unnatural” rhetorical games in Spanish, becomes a repository for the most emblematic Gelmanian traits.

What is more, Gelman employs his self-translations as a method to further alienate himself from Spanish, in that his translations are virtually devoid of the idiosyncratic qualities typical of his poetry. The nondescript nature of the Spanish of his translations vacillates between the Argentine vos and standard tú forms of the secondperson singular. Furthermore, Gelman observes correct verbal forms in instances where he would normally toss out the grammatical rulebook, such as in Poem XVI, where he translates “muridu” as “muerto” instead of “morido,” the latter sounding both closer to the Ladino but also constituting an intentional error found frequently throughout Gelman’s previous work. His self-translations, therefore, do not represent a full return or assimilation into his native Spanish. By denying the Spanish the intimacy and new expressive horizons he discovers in Ladino, the poet displaces Spanish as the privileged terrain for his poetic voice, converting it into the mirror of the Other.

Only by descending into the substrata of these Spanishes, toward the most exiled roots of language, can Gelman recover the tenderness of his motherland and his mother tongue and reject the discourse commandeered by the military junta. Through this adopted language of exile, the poet finds a type of confirmation rather than a realization regarding the power of estrangement as a return to the self.

From Dibaxu

“Poem XVI.” Composed in Ladino and taken from the first original manuscript of Dibaxu, dated August 5, 1983. This manuscript, containing Gelman’s hand-written revisions, is the first of three original drafts of Dibaxu housed in Princeton’s special collection.

Source: Juan Gelman Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

“Poetry is a leafless tree that gives shade.” Juan Gelman Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Newspaper clipping requesting information regarding the whereabouts of Sylvia Estela Pettigrew, a disappeared person. The words beneath Gelman’s poem read, “We who survive still need answers. Your daughter, Karina Casanova Pettigrew.” Source: Fondo Luis Mangieri, Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas, CeDInCI.