Neo-djudezmo in the Latin-American Dissident Poetry: The Construction of Interstitial Registers Between Self-Translation and Glossaries

Abstract

In the background of the extermination of species and cultures characteristic of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene and, among them, that of the Sephardic culture during the Shoah, the article wonders about the announced agony of the Judeo-Spanish language and the end of an era of native minor languages. It addresses the field of the new djudezmo poetry in Latin America, as well as the role played by metalinguistic devices such as self-translation and the glossary in the process of its production. The article focuses on the case studies Poemas de Estambul (2008) and El saco de Douglas (2011) by Denise León (Argentina), and Ansina (2015) by Myriam Moscona (Mexico). The poetry collection Dibaxu (1994) by Juan Gelman is identified not only as the main hypotext of these works but also as an epistemic event – an intertextual producer of new knowledge – in Ibero-Amer­ican literature that plays the role of a decolonial artifact because it advocates to revisit, through the choice of ‘the language of otherness’, the Hispanic colonialist/Christianizing and expulsionist ethos. In relation to the metalinguistic mechanisms identified when publishing poetry in neo-Djudezmo and in comparison with Gelman’s proposal of interstitial reading, the article evaluates the concept of “twinned texts” suggested by J. Walsh Hokenson and M. Munson when thinking about bilingual literatures. It then examines the translinguistic manifestations of these texts, verifying its effects on the gender divergence they raise. Finally, it postulates that, by resisting modernity, through its dissidence, poetry in neo-Djudezmo produces a poetic avant-garde.