Introduction

Multilingualism^[1]has historically been the norm in Jewish textual traditions. Paradoxically, it was only after the Jewish Enlightenment in the mid-eighteenth century, but especially with the globalization of the press market in the twentieth century, that Jewish authors and editors began adapting the presentation of their texts to the Western homogenous mode of publication: monolingualism. “There is nothing more exalted than the task of the Jewish translator,” opens David G. Roskies his account on the co-foundation of the journal Prooftexts (Roskies 2004, 263–272); the text, while dealing with an autobiographic aspect of his project as an editor, splendidly shows how, also today, the battle on language and the vicissitudes carried on by multilingualism, is central in Jewish writing and publishing, and how the Jewish writing project – in any particular form – is, in his own words, principally a project of “emancipation” (266).

Within the Jewish – manuscripted more than printed – world, multilingualism remains the preferred modus operandi, whether expressed through multigraphism or monographism. Historically, this involved utilizing (primarily) the Hebrew abjad while voicing one or multiple languages, or the use of the Arabic abjad, the Latin and Greek alphabets, or any other scriptural system (Minarvini 2018), allowing for the production of multilingual texts, which in Medieval Spain were called aljamiados.^[2] While in Jewish texts, multilingualism does not necessarily allow to distinguish kodesh veḥol – holy from profane – it certainly makes it possible to identify the historical provenance and spatial belonging(s) of the writer(s). That is, unless fiction, impersonation, or imposture come into play, as is the case in the translation of the Passover Haggadah by Carlos Moisés Grünberg, his Narración de la Pascua, published in 1946 in Argentina. It is a translation that, through a very particular use of the Spanish language, situates itself in the Hispano-Jewish tradition.

Indeed, the case of the Passover Haggadah is representative of the Jewish condition of books and manuscripts: Haggadot are generally bilingual, juxtaposing Hebrew to La’az (foreign language) and other Judeo-languages (e.g. Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo Arabic) – or even trilingual if we count the Haggadah’s Aramaic opening (הָא לַחְמָא עַנְיָא [this is the bread of affliction]), the Aramaic song attached (חַד גַדְיָא [One Baby Goat]) and the Aramaic terms used within the Hebraic text. In medieval Spain – from where Sephardic culture evolved after the 1492 expulsion –,

multilingual texts [were] basically Hebrew, Arabic or Romance texts that embod[ied] isolated words or phrases, or even a shorter text, in another language. Multilingualism thus aimed at improving the understanding or the performance of the text (glosses, instructions for the Passover seder, incipits of songs) or had an essentially aesthetic function (ḵarja); there was a desire or a requirement for accuracy and exactitude in legal deeds and commercial records. Only in glossaries was there a situation of equality among languages. (Minervini 2018, 412–413)

Nevertheless, the case of Grünberg’s twentieth-century multilingual text diverges significantly, as its multilingual nature is rather concealed within the text. The translator’s prologue subtly hints at its presence through an explanation of the chosen calque, or loan translation method: the traditional so called hyper-literal, word-for-word translation method connecting Hebrew and Romance languages in the Iberian Peninsula.

1. The Passover Haggadah in Carlos M. Grünberg’s Utopian Translation

Towards the end of the Shoah and after a decade of growing neofascism in Argentina, Grünberg’s utopian translation – as I call it – of the Passover Haggadah in neo-Sephardic overtones produced a transhistorical voice announcing the emancipation from Pharaoh, Amalek, and Hitler. The Haggadah or “Passover Narrative” is, in its origin, a liturgical text that emerged to fulfill a biblical mandate: that of parents transmitting to their children the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The original text belongs not to one but to multiple authors and editors. It varies not only according to its editions and translations but also through the voices of its readers and reciters, who are also multiple, choral figures that, to varying degrees, read, interpret, and even bypass sections of the Haggadah as needed: in the diaspora, two readings one night after another; in the Land of Israel, only one. According to Vanessa Ochs, in her Biography of the Haggadah, the Torah not only provides the narration of the exodus but also the linguistic imaginative and very reason of the Haggadah’s existence (Ochs 2020, 26).

Carlos Moisés Grünberg (1903–1968), a Judeo-Argentinian poet, member of the Martinfierrista Argentinian avant-garde in the 1920 s, was also a professional jurist, a philologist, and a diplomat who, during the 1940 s, played an important role in establishing diplomatic relations between Argentina and the new-born State of Israel (Toker 1999). A psychoanalytical footnote on Grünberg’s translation choice in relation to its biographical context would perhaps also add that his own paternal family arrived from Palestine and Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century and that Argentina became for his parents, as well as for the writer himself, a promised land. Grünberg’s utopian translation of the Haggadah from 1946 – “his” Narración de la Pascua [Passover Narrative] – adds to the poet’s imaginary the semantic field of Passover. This Jewish imaginary grew and developed between the writing of his third poetry book, Mester de judería [Ministry of Jewry] (1940),^[3] and his fourth one, Junto a un río de Babel [By a River of Babel] (1965), thereby shaping his writer’s persona into a properly Jewish homme de lettres.

As Carlos Moisés Grünberg stated in the prologue to his own translation written in Buenos Aires, the Passover Narrative “constitutes the oldest known hymn to freedom.” Luis Kardúner, a contemporary of the poet and a Yiddish translator, reviewing the work, affirms: “[W]e are in the presence of a translation of uncommon merits. La Narración de la Pascua, in Carlos M. Grünberg’s Spanish version, is itself a literary event because it sets a standard for Hebrew translations. [[E]stamos en presencia de una traducción de méritos nada comunes. La ‘Narración de la Pascua’, en la versión castellana de Carlos M. Grünberg, es en sí un acontecimiento literario, porque marca una pauta a las traducciones del hebreo.]” (Kardúner 1946, 83) Indeed, Grünberg’s translation of the Haggadah can neither be compared to any other translation in Argentina nor to that of any other Hispanic country in modern times. Only by seeking into the Jewish world in Spain before the expulsion in 1492, and in what would become the Sephardic diaspora and constitute its sacred writings (after 1492), can we find parallels in terms of Hispanic Jewish translatology.^[4]

Grünberg’s prologue constructs a historical and genetic narrative of the Haggadah (Grünberg 1946 a, xii-xv). As a palimpsest, the Haggadah makes use of a multitude of liturgical texts in Hebrew and, to a lesser extent, in Aramaic (pp. 14–17, unit 7; pp. 158–167, unit 89).^[5] However, “it is doubtful whether the coexistence of Hebrew and Aramaic on the same page was perceived as an instance of real multilingualism, since both were considered Holy Tongues, or perhaps a single Holy Tongue, highly esteemed and revered, and felt as distant from the vernacular languages used in daily life” (Minervini 2018, 407). In fact, Grünberg’s translation does not mark the presence of a distinguished language (Aramaic) in the body of the text. Thus, bilingualism (Hebrew-Aramaic) is invisibilized in the Hispanic text.

In his prologue, Grünberg also alludes to the biography of his translation:

I undertook my translation of the Narrative [Haggadah] – the oldest known hymn to freedom, the hymn of freedom of my lineage – in mid-1943, under circumstances where a month and a half had passed since, on the first night of Passover, 19 April 1943, the 40000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a remnant of 600000, had risen in arms against the Nazis, determined to exact a high price for their lives, as they certainly did for forty-two days and nights, in the most heroic episode of the Second World War, and with the hope of publishing my translation for the first post-Hitlerian Passover.^[6]

[Emprendí mi traducción de la Narración – del himno de libertad más antiguo que se conoce, a la vez himno de libertad de mi estirpe –, a mediados de 1943, en circunstancias en que hacía un mes y medio que, en la primera noche de Pascua del 19 de abril de 1943, los 40.000 judíos del gueto de Varsovia, remanente de 600.000, se habían levantado en armas contra los nazis, resueltos a cobrarles caro sus vidas, como por cierto lo hicieron durante cuarenta y dos días y noches, en el episodio más heroico de la segunda guerra mundial, y con la esperanza de publicar mi traducción para la primera Pascua posthitleriana.] (Grünberg 1946 a: xv)

In the translator’s words, then, his translation labor is directly related to contemporary geopolitics and the tragic faith of the Jewish people – one that the Hebraic text transhistorically mirrors when describing and representing the persecution of the Pharaoh but also adding a perspective of hope and a key to emancipation. The subtext of this publication is implicitly utopian, and could be paraphrased as follows: “Pharaoh and Amalek we have traversed; we shall traverse this [Hitler] too.”

2. The Calque Method and Multilingualism

In his prologue, Grünberg describes in detail different manuscripts and printed versions of the Haggadah across the centuries and in different geographies. He proves that his knowledge of the Haggadah’s printing history and its various translations is broad and precise. In terms of form and methodology, the prologue to the Narración also explicitly states his original working method, making his translation unparalleled:

Eager to perform a scientific and objective translation, not an artistic and subjective one, and benefiting from the wonderful syntactic flexibility and infinite possibilities of Spanish, I have rendered the ’Narrative’ word by word, preserving the original order of each word in the sentence, its function in the sentence, its etymological meaning, and its unit, singularity, or autonomy, and preserving, with the latter, to each original sentence its number of words and its primitive laconism.

[Deseoso de realizar una traducción científica y objetiva, no artística y subjetiva, y beneficiando de la maravillosa flexibilidad sintáctica y las infinitas posibilidades del español, he vertido la “Narración”, palabra por palabra, conservando a cada vocablo original su lugar de orden en la oración, su función oracional, su significado etimológico y su unidad, singularidad o autonomía, y conservando, con esto último a cada oración original su número de palabras y su laconismo primitivo.] (xiii)

Grünberg highlights both the “use of archaisms” and the creation of new words allowed by “the wonderful syntactic flexibility” of Spanish – features that are well known from the Sephardic tradition: “Viewed historically, as compared with the language ordinarily employed by the spontaneous translators in their own everyday speech, the Ladino glosses often constituted archaisms, or artificial neologisms meant to replicate the structure of Hebrew elements lacking exact counterparts in ordinary Judezmo” (Bunis 1996, 348). In addition to these two categories I have identified several translational choices. Furthermore, I found a symbolic number in this Passover translation that functions as a leitmotiv and intertextual reference to the Biblical narrative and is implicitly repeated: about 40 neologisms, about 40 misused terms and 40 archaizing voices, the incorporation of two Hebrew terms similarly used in Judeo-Spanish (Dio and nabí [from Hebrew, נביא, spokesperson, prophet]), as well as a plurality of what the translator terms as a method of etymological translations. Grünberg masterfully employs this method. However, he does not mention in his prologue that structural transpositions of a sentence as well as etymological translations are well-known in Hebrew translatology, prominently in the Iberian and Sephardic world to which he establishes a genealogy through his particular performance of Spanish. This group of translatological choices is called the “calque method.” Indeed, the medieval calque method, also known as Ladinar (turning a Hebraic text into Romance), was used in pedagogical settings for Torah instruction in which the rabbi or melamed (teacher) orally translated the Torah as he read it, resulting in a Ladino reading, that is, an oral version of the Torah in Romance language that preserved the syntactic structure of the original Hebrew. As Iacob M. Hassan explains:

The Sephardic Ladinar tradition has always been principally an oral tradition and only secondarily written; and although those texts were eventually memorized, the essence of Ladination consisted not so much in reproducing a memorized text but mostly in mastering the linguistic principles on which translation relies in order to apply them anew and re-produce an equivalent text on every single occasion.

[La tradición sefardí de ladinar ha sido siempre primordialmente oral y sólo secundariamente escrita; y aunque los textos acaben por memorizarse, la esencia del ladinaje consiste no tanto en reproducir un texto memorizado sino en dominar los principios lingüísticos en que se basa la traducción y saber aplicarlos para re-producir (para producir de nuevo) en cada ocasión un texto equivalente.] (Hassan 2004, 90)

Exceptionally, the oral translation exercise codified or Latinized a Hebrew word that eventually became part of the Romance language. It is this same exercise that Grünberg had chosen in order to translate the Haggadah, this time, however, in writing, as in the sixteenth century when the once-Marranos, Abraham Usque and Yom-Tob Athias, transcribed the Ladino Bible in the city of Ferrara (1553). In Grünberg’s case, the main vector of the translation is also the calque method – called in Ladino, a de cavesa [lit. by head] translation and in Hebrew a milibam [מִלִּבָּם, by heart, lit. from their heart] translation (Bunis 1996, 340). This translatological method allows for an investigation into what Foucault called “the archaeology of knowledge”: such exploration specifically regards the archeology of the Romance language. It situates the translator and poet in the Jewish tradition, notably the Sephardic one, a matter that entails not only cultural but also glottopolitical implications.^[7] In the past, the main object of the calque translation was not the targeted translated text but, rather, the vivid adoption of the method of translation:

in instructing his pupils in the translation of texts from Hebrew into Ladino, the traditional teacher seems to have seen as his main objective not so much to ensure that all Judezmo-speaking pupils would produce entirely identical translations, but rather to provide a somewhat flexible framework within which would be generated a translation that would satisfy the demands of the tradition as it was being upheld during the teacher’s particular time period, in his specific geographic region, and in accordance with certain of his own personal requirements. (Bunis 1996, 344)

In summary, the aim of the Sephardic melamed was the method itself: the objective was to ensure the perseveration of the educational and transmission system, and, within it, to warrant the teaching process of the translating procedure. Closely related to that principle, metadiscourse, discourse, and methodology appear to be intrinsically related in Grünberg’s prologue. In his twentieth-century calque translation, he accommodates the Sephardic method in order to ascribe and identify to the oral Sephardic tradition while he is, nevertheless, producing a written version. This oral “imposture” – as I propose to call it – additionally connects with the oral tradition related to the narration of Passover, communicated from generation to generation through storytelling, collective reading, singing, and praying.

However, the metadiscourse surrounding Narración de la Pascua should be read from a comprehensive perspective on Carlos Moisés Grünberg’s work. Indeed, the Hebraic translation is part of a broader personal project in which the poet conducted selective translations of the biblical books of Genesis (1946b) and Psalms (1946c), contemporaneous with the Passover Narrative. Moreover, in 1937, the author had already produced an enlightening philological work titled Hebraisms and Crypto-Hebraisms in the Peninsular and American Romance [Hebraísmos y criptohebraísmos en el romance peninsular y americano], where he delved into the Spanish language in search of the Hebrew treasure and demonstrated, in several cases, how Hebrew is encrypted in Spanish – this certainly preceded the arrival of Michail Bakhtin’s study on polyphony to the West (1984).^[8] His theory contradicted the Philo-Latin perspectives of renowned Hispanic philologists, such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal and the Royal Spanish Academy itself, that attributed an indisputable and totalitarian Roman and Hellenic heritage to the Spanish language.^[9] Grünberg’s intervention on this topic took place eleven years before the first trial and inaccurate incursion of Américo Castro into the Jewish world of Spain (1948). Narración represents the continuation of Hebraísmos: moreover, it puts his theoretical linguistic discoveries into translatory practice. In this sense, Narración allows a chain of Hebraic decryptions, thus, a deep exploration into the archaeology of the Hispanic Romance. It also implies a re-Judaization of Spanish.

While the translation is printed facing the original Hebrew and Aramaic text and is visually presented as a bilingual work – being Hebraic in its pagination, from right to left – this study focuses on the intrinsically multilingual nature of the translation itself. Multilingual aspects emerge from using the calque method that shaped this specific translation, irrespective of its connection to the original translated text. Indeed, in the superficial dimension of Grünberg’s volume, there is no multilingualism beyond bilingualism. Rather, in the core dimension of the formation of the Passover language, the calque method utilized by Grünberg represents a hybridization, a miscegenation of languages, that is inherently multilingual. Truly, Grünberg’s text is a golem^[10] in which several languages and linguistic registers throb; in the Jewish realm, where Hebrew persists in contact with other languages (Weinreich 1963), there is always a minimum level of permeability that allows mutual contamination between languages and in literary texts can be identified through a multilingual inherence that vibrates through the voice of the reader while reading, in this case, for others. This happens on two different levels:

1. Hebrew and Spanish cohabit on the (left) page through etymological translation.

2. By means of a transhistorical operation, Spanish and Judeo-Spanish coexist in the text through the creation of neologisms and the presence of archaizing voices.

The fusion of these two levels of linguistic cohabitation (1. Hebrew and Spanish, 2. Spanish and Judeo-Spanish) produces a highly innovative version of the Haggadah in what I propose to call a Judeo-Spanish imposture^[11] that installs the reader in an intricate network of Hebrew, Aramaic, archaic Spanish and Hispanic koine that altogether appear as Judeo-Spanish.

In terms of Till Dembeck, a “toolkit of multilingual philology” is needed when analyzing plurilingual texts because “any text can be read with regard to the variety of linguistic means of expressions which are used [italics in the original]. This is the basic operation of what I would like to call multilingual philology” (Dembeck 2017, 3–4). While indeed, the concept of “heterolingualism”^[12] [hétérolinguisme] (Grutman 1997) does represent the case of Grünberg’s mestizo, i. e. miscegenated text, we consider that multilingualism produces and is produced within cultural and glottopolitical tensions. Nevertheless, the calque case of Grünberg is radical in terms of heterolingualism and multilingualism: ce n’est pas le cas du code-switching or that of mixing palabras una after the otra, as the multilingual traverses not only the linguistic treasure proposed in the text but also the structure of the sentence, syntax, and grammar. In as far as multilingualism abuts on the miscegenation of languages and hence, it should be more precisely defined as mestizo – a definition already suggested by Ricardo Feierstein when characterizing Jewish culture in Argentina (Feierstein 1986). As a miscegenated translation, the Narración also traverses space and history, producing the transhistorical and transnational characteristics of Jewish literature. The glottopolitical and cultural tensions it triggers will be discussed in the last part of this article.

3. Etymological Translation

The peculiarity and originality of Grünberg’s Passover Narrative lie in its work of etymological translation. This procedure consists, first, in the identification of Hebrew linguistic roots, then, in the decoding of crypto-Hebraism in the Spanish word, or alternatively, in cases where no crypto-Hebraism is found, in searching for the etymological root of the word equivalent to Hebrew in Spanish. In this context, Alan Astro rightly states that:

Neologism (as in “circuncida” or “circumcide”) has its counterpart in something we may call neologistically enough in this sense, archeologism – the unearthing of forgotten lexemes. A particularly obsessive mining of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy in search of archaic terms of Hebrew origin was a strategy often employed by neo-Sephardic writers. (Astro 2012, 4)

While Grünberg indeed usually opts for using words unusually or reclaims forgotten words or second meanings, he also often reshapes an existing word or disrupts the linguistic root, producing neologisms, either transforming the adjective into a noun or the noun into a verb. It is noteworthy here that etymological translation can undermine sense in favor of homophonic or homomorphic concordances.

As background to this method in the Sephardic world, Beatrice Schmid says that in the 18th century, with the printing emancipation of the Sephardic People in the Ottoman Empire, a [Modern] literary language – inaugurated by the Biblical commentary of Me’am Lo’ez in 1730 – started developing, “following Hebraic stylistic models and relying on Hebrew as the primary source for neology [siguiendo modelos estilísticos hebreos y aprovechando el hebreo como fuente principal para la neología]” (Schmid 2018, 248). This contrasted with the following phase, during the 19th century, in which Judeo-Spanish changed through new literary and journalistic genres and modernization consisted of a Europeanization and Romanization of the Sephardic vernacular (Schmid 2018, 249). In other words, by the mid-19th century, Judeo-Spanish suffered, depending on one’s viewpoint, transculturation or Western cultural colonization agented through Jewish liberalism, specifically through the Alliance Israëlite Universelle.

In his Hagaddah, Genesis, and psalmist translations, Grünberg connects with the first phase of Judeo-Spanish emancipation in which Hebrew became “the main source for neology,” that is to say, Hebrew roots served as the main source to form new words in Judeo-Spanish (248). Nevertheless, he also pushed the limits of Spanish in order to include in the linguistic thesaurus of his Haggadah, Hebraic neologisms, Spanish archaisms, and novel forms (Senkman 1984, 34). Within the examples of Grünberg’s etymological translations, I suggest to differentiate between two categories:

1. Etymological translations of the first degree – those that are born from Hebrew or Aramaic roots.

2. Etymological translations of the second degree – those that are created following an etymological ascendence from Latin or Romance.

An example of category (a.): When translating the plural noun “bnei ḥorin” [בני חורין] from Aramaic – in English liberated people – the translator uses the word “horros,”^[13] a disused term in Spanish, that was archaically pronounced with an aspired ḥ.^[14] Horro in Spanish means exactly the same as the singular noun bar ḥorin, a liberated person, following the Real Academia Española de la Lengua’s definition about a person, “who, having been a slave, acquires freedom [Dicho de una persona: Que, habiendo sido esclava, alcanza la libertad]” (RAE 2024, entry horro, horra). Moreover, horro and bar ḥorin share the same Aramaic and Hebraic root (kh-r-r; ח-ר-ר) – one that has its equivalent also in Arabic. This means that it is highly probable that horro is a crypto-Hebraic word, another one to add to Grünberg’s 1937 list.

(b.) An etymological translation of the second degree, translating the Aramaic word divrayia [דִבְּרַיָא] (Grünberg 1946, 155) for “commandments” – in direct reference to the ten Biblical commandments – plays with the equivalent Romance root of the singular noun davar [דָּבָר], which in Spanish is palabra. Thus, instead of the common – but misleading – translation as “mandamientos,” Grünberg translates here “palabras.” (Grünberg 1946, 119) A second example of an etymological translation of the second degree, which makes the translator’s choice unusual, is that of “regificarán” instead of “coronarán” [ימליכו] for: “he will crown.” Since the future verb yamlikhu [ימליכו] belongs to the root melekh [מלך] – also: “king” –, Grünberg used the related Latin root rex, rey in Spanish, to build the new verb regificar. While the word does not exist in contemporary Spanish, the root appears in words such as regio, an adjective derived from rey or regir, to govern.

4. Neologisms

As mentioned, regificar is not the only neologism in Grünberg’s translation. The significant influx of new words prompts both categorization of the phenomenon and a focused examination of the process of neological formation. Grünberg’s neology could be potentially divided between the creation process of (1.) new words ex-nihilo (“out of nothing”), (2.) through “formation” (formal and semantic) or (3.) by loan from another language (Cabré et.al. 2000, 92–93). Thereby, we can a priori exclude the first category (creation ex-nihilo) following the understanding that etymological translation is not spontaneous but planned and lies at the basis of the formation of new words in this Judeo-Hispanic translation. Regarding the third category, Grünberg has, indeed, introduced in his Narration a few “foreign” words – although, this characterization sounds inappropriate when referring to a transnational and per se multilingual text. The creation of neologisms through formation, in the second category, is the most common in the studied text. It can also be denominated as “neonimia” or “specialized neology” (Cabré, et al. 2000, 93) since Grünberg’s translation is highly intellectualized and thus pertains to the less common kind of neology: the “cultured composition [composición culta].” While the referenced study characterizes “cultured compositions” through the use of Greek or Latin elements (102), in our case study, I propose to add to this characterization the composition of words through different uses of Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as calque translations transmitting into Spanish the structural (root-based), syntactic or semantic treasure of Semitic languages. Quantitatively, of a total of 40 identified formative neologisms, 24 (60 %) are nouns, 8 (20 %) are verbs, 5 (12.5 %) are adjectives and 3 (7.5 %) are adverbs. The repartition points at the aim of reactivating and renewing language in all its forms.^[15]

I have selected 14 neologisms out of the 40 identified in order to offer a glance at the variety of new words presented in Narración (Table I). For reasons of space, I will refer directly only to three of them:

First, going back to the retrieved archaism “horro,” Grünberg not only rescued this word, but he also used it as a resource for one of his neologisms, “ahorramiento” (Grünberg 1946, 63). If horro means “liberated person” [a partial homophonic translation of (ben) ḥorin], ahorramiento indicates “liberation” and, in the specific case of the conformation of the Hebrew people as a political being, ahorramiento also highlights the underlying process of “emancipation”. The word horro is added here with a Hispanic prefix (“a”) and suffix (“miento”). In Spanish, the prefix “a allows a word to change its agency in the phrase. However, the neologist method of this thesaurus converts a noun [horro] into a different noun [ahorramiento]. Its particularity is conducted through the suffix -miento, which indicates an accomplished process of becoming something else (a devenir). Indeed, ahorramiento points to the course of liberation and beyond (the trajectory of which aims at attaining also mental and political emancipation). The word is disturbing because it could be confused with ahorro, meaning, (money) savings, or the verb ahorrar, to economize. In sum, Grunberg’s translation through neology allows to condense the interpretative realm of the Narration.

Second, “decenvirato” – formed through the union of the number ten (diez) and the Latin virorum, meaning “men” – is used to indicate a minyan, the required group of at least ten men to pray the Kaddish, an Aramaic praise to G-d (the Hebrew deity). Since minyan (“quorum of ten men”) is considered an untranslatable word – apparently having no parallel in other cultures – usually the word is introduced in non-Hebraic languages through transliteration. However, here Grünberg overtranslates a concept that, in the context of the Haggadah, has no need for translation. Most probably, is that Jewish readers discovering Narración will feel estranged by the word decenvirato, which resonates in Spanish with political organizations in historical frameworks such as triunvirato in Latin American emancipated countries or, perhaps, ecclesiastical assemblies unrelated to Jewish life. In the Roman world, though, decenvirato was the name of an institution with extraordinary powers to legislate. In conclusion, here, Grünberg has either coined a neologism or displaced an existing word from its original sphere in order to resignify it.

Indeed, estrangement can be identified as Narración’s driving intentionality in the translation of the Haggadah. A third example, fornecedor, enhances the understanding that the text aims at communicating poetically and not mimetically. Fornecedor, meaning G-d as a provider for life, is a French calque of fournisseur, which, both in French and in Spanish, can be either a noun or an adjective. Grünberg’s illumination lies in the fact that the French word shares the same root with the Hebrew one (f-r-n-s, פ-ר-נ-ס). While archaically, Spanish used the words fornir and fornecer, they both communicate with Catalan and French forms.

The author is then possibly pointing at the path of linguistic and semantic transmission through the historical trajectory of the Provençal Jews, who were joined by the Sephardic diaspora during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

5. (Simulated) Archaisms and Rarities

Out of forty archaisms and estranging deviations identified in Narración, I have brought here ten as a paradigm (see table II), but will discuss only three of them. Regarding archaisms, it would be more accurate to denominate them “simulated archaisms” or “archaizing terms.” Some of these archaizing terms are of interest due to their unconventional usage compared to their historical employments. This kind of procedure is called “semantic neology.” In distinction to neologies discussed above, “semantic neology” consists in employing an existing word by giving it a new meaning. Grünberg’s choice of rare or unusual words reinforces the archaizing effect. This is the case of the past tense enlegajaba, the translation for karakh [כרך] in Hebrew; it does not represent an archaism but an existing word misused in Spanish which offers a Calque translation. Indeed, in Hebrew, the verb likrokh – for “to fold, to file” – works both in the semantic fields of stationery, press, and the culinary field. In Hebrew, and specifically in the Haggadah, a (matzah) sandwich is called a karikh, just as a legal folder or a written volume, kerekh, contains soft paper between two harder covers; the covers themselves are called krikhah. Grünberg then adjudicates the Hebrew use of likrokh/karikh to the Spanish words enlegajar and legajo, transforming in Spanish a legal folder or a booklet (such as the Haggadah) into a culinary matzah-sandwich; while the effect on the Spanish reader is disturbing, the matzah-folder (the legajo de matzá) certainly follows the Jewish ordinations for the Pesaḥ seder. By linking through translation, the book culture to the culinary and symbolic actions of Passover, Grünberg achieves a mise en abyme of his own work.

Second, the translation of afikoman seems overtranslated since the Aramaic word – as the previous example for minyan – is untranslatable, and thus, the term afikoman is always preserved in Haggada translations. The choice of sobrecomida – a composed word of sobre (on top of) and comida (food, meal), composed like afikoman (afiko and man) – allows a partial phonetic coincidence between comida (food) and koman (ko+food), which in Spanish sounds as the imperative coman (eat). Sobrecomida is archaizing because it is rarely used; it reminds perhaps of sobremesa, a cultural practice, particularly Argentinian, which consists of chattering at the meal table long or even hours after the meal.

Third, the verb sabatizar (sabbatize, to keep the shabbat), which is an evident Hebrew calque and etymological translation from the first degree, borrowed into Spanish from the root sh-b-t, ש-ב-ת is employed here in its literal Hebrew used, meaning to stop working, to cease labor sharply. In this sense, it can be identified as a semantic neology in Spanish when it proposes a translation for Genesis II, 2–3 as follows:

Y había concluido Dios, en el día séptimo, Su obra, que había mirificado, y sabatizó, en el día séptimo, de toda Su obra, que había mirificado.

Y bendijo Dios el día séptimo y sagrólo, que en él había sabatizado de toda Su obra, que había creado Dios mirificando.

[On the seventh day, God finished the work that had been undertaken: [God] ceased on the seventh day from doing any of the work. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy – having ceased on it from all the work of creation that God had done.] (Grünberg 1946, 9)^[16]

Through this example, among many others, the neologist and translator judaizes and hebraicizes contemporary Spanish. He creates a new form of Judeo-Hispanic, enriching and enhancing thereby the long chain of this postmemorial genre: Jewish translation (Gabbay in press).

6. The Neo-Sephardic Imposture

Considering that Sephardic literature has traditionally been mainly oral, performed through romances, proverbs, tales, and singing, Carlos Moisés Grünberg’s translation is simultaneously traditional and groundbreaking. On the one hand, it imbricates itself in an old methodological practice; on the other hand, it scripturizes orality. His Hebraist translation work, dominated by liturgical and testimonial sources, and particularly, thanks to the development of the calque method, leads the Spanish language to the extremes of its own semantic, syntactic, and grammatical field and acquires political and glottopolitical values in the translation of the Passover narrative. One would even say that Grünberg followed Walter Benjamin’s suggestion in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers [The Task of the Translator]” when Benjamin praises Rudolf Pannwitz’s writing in Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur:

The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own, he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible, to what extent any language can be transformed, how language differs from language almost the way dialect differs from dialect. (Pannwitz 2002, 262)

Certainly, the Hebraic breath that Carlos Moisés Grünberg insufflates into contemporary Spanish precisely meets Benjamin’s (1921) and Pannwitz’s theory on translation. This certainly is confirmed in Benjamin essay’s last paragraph: “For to some degree, all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true above all of sacred writings. The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation.” (Benjamin 2002, 263) Grünberg, in fact, produced an interlinear version of the Haggadah through his literary impersonation of Judeo-Spanish, which allows for the hidden presence of Hebrew to be highlighted in Spanish.

Regarding the perspective on language and translation, there seem to be further coincidences between Benjamin’s and Grünberg’s perspectives. Benjamin argues for linguistic purity as a result of the amalgam of all languages: “Rather, all suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: in every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant. Yet this one thing is achievable not by any single language but only by the totality of their intentions supplementing one another: the pure language” (Benjamin 2002, 257). Similarly, but this time, in the realm of the translation practice, Grünberg identifies encrypted Hebrew in Spanish and highlights the miscegenation (el mestizaje) of Spanish and Hebrew visioning a common origin for all languages: while he valued their diversity, he saw in the difference between them the proof of a common nature.^[17] Moreover, the proof of the common origin of languages, both in Benjamin and Grünberg is, in Benjamin’s terms (and especially paying attention to St. André’s argument on Benjamin’s essay), the afterlife of the work of art in its translation (St. André 2011, 103–123): here, the renewing interpretation of the Hebrew Haggadah in its Hebraic-Spanish translation. As Benjamin adds:

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade. (Benjamin 2002, 260)’

Die wahre Übersetzung ist durchscheinend, sie verdeckt nicht das Original, steht ihm nicht im Licht, sondern läßt die reine Sprache, wie verstärkt durch ihr eigenes Medium, nur um so voller aufs Original fallen. Das vermag vor allem Wörtlichkeit in der Übertragung der Syntax und gerade sie erweist das Wort, nicht den Satz als das Urelement des Übersetzers. Denn der Satz ist die Mauer vor der Sprache des Originals, Wörtlichkeit die Arkade.

Following Benjamin’s position, Grünberg’s translation of the Haggadah is transparent. It allows the pure language ’to shine upon the original’ and, also, to transhistorically illuminate Spanish.

Grünberg’s translations, in many instances, imitate archaic forms in order to produce neologisms or simulate the use of Judeo-Spanish. Yet, he is not writing in Judeo-Spanish, but creates a new form of Hebraic Spanish, the so-called “neo-Sephardic.” Only apparently do his translations reintegrate archaizing forms of Spanish into America, as well as neologisms that explicitly evoke a forgotten Hispanic heritage, by crystallizing together in what I propose to coin a neo-Sephardic imposture. This imposture has also been practiced by other Argentine and Ibero-American authors – from Alberto Gerchunoff (1883–1950) in the early twentieth century in Argentina to Juan Gelman (1930–2014) in the late twentieth century in his Hispano-Mexican exile –, who, without forming a literary movement, delved into what Edna Aizenberg defined as neo-Sephardism in Latin American literature, particularly represented by writers of Ashkenazi origin:

Like Gerchunoff, Grünberg conceived Sephardism as the best gateway to Latin American culture, as an argument against those who wanted to discredit the Hebraic belonging to Latin America, whether in the flood-like period of massive immigration at the beginning of the 20^th century or in the era of Nazi-falangism. Does this mean that the authors of Los gauchos judíos [Alberto Gerchunoff] and Mester de judería [Carlos M. Grünberg] are neo-Sephardic, like their generation mate, Samuel Glusberg, aka Enrique Espinoza? Mair José Benardete [USA] claimed to have coined that neologism, since for him and other Sephardic intellectuals like Henry Besso [USA] and León S. Pérez, Latin America was a Promised Land for the rebirth of Judeo-Hispanic culture. In Latin America, Sephardim would not only re-Sephardize but also Ashkenazim would neo-Sephardize, losing their Yiddish cultural baggage and acquiring the attributes of Hispanic Jews. “Ashkenazi Jews find Spain in Latin America,” asserts Pérez, “and must integrate into this Spain.” According to Benardete’s definition, Gerchunoff and Grünberg are neo-Sephardic, even more so for their deliberate and enthusiastic adoption of Sephardic heritage as a tool of acculturation. (Aizenberg 2003, 55)^[18]

Particularly in Grünberg’s case, the translation recreates a Sephardic space through linguistic forms, Hispanic sound, and the intonation derived from these (Meschonnic 1999) in an American and modern land. This procedure allowed him to achieve three differentiated objectives: firstly, the Passover Narrative fights the historical invisibility of Judeo-Spanish; secondly, the vindication of Spanish in its “crypto-Hebraic” root serves as cultural mediation to reaffirm Judaism’s belonging to Latin America; and finally, the calque, foreignizing translation, allows him to carry out a semiotic insurgency and glottopolitical resistance against local and European nationalist proscriptions.

In the context of literature and translation in Judeo-Spanish, the Sephardic diaspora has certainly produced its own corpus, although in terms of dimensions and impact, it cannot be compared to the corpus of other Jewish diasporas in Latin America, in particular, of Yiddish intellectuals. The sparse Judeo-Spanish literary corpus is absolutely detached from the neo-Sephardic phenomenon; in Argentina, one could assert that the constellation of Ashkenazi intellectuals overshadowed Sephardic writers because, among a series of different cultural and political circumstances, in the Argentinian imaginary, they were identified as carrying the cultural capital of modernity. In contrast, Sephardic writers might not have been identified as markers of a lettered culture – a fallacy, given that the first Sephardic diaspora in the “New World” starting from the sixteenth century under Spanish rule, most of them Spanish conversos or Marranos, was well represented (Lewin 1954 and 1987; Avni 2005) among the local bureaucrats and colonial pen professions – jurists, administrators, chroniclers, accountants, and clergy (Gabbay 2022 a, 145–163). While the ethnic and cultural identity of their heirs was widely invisibilized after the eighteenth century, the inherited knowledge and cultural capital of the first Sephardic diaspora integrated the intelligentsia of the “lettered city” [la ciudad letrada] – a socio-cultural class which, after national independence was achieved across the continent (1810–1898) and through the immediate postcolonial era, gained the freedom to elaborate criticism towards the national power while remaining beneficiaries of it (Rama 1984). Finally, in the contemporary realm, I have identified a Latin American literary phenomenon in hispanized Judeo-Spanish, which I called “Neo-djudezmo poetry” (Gabbay 2022 b, 65–94). Independent from the Ashkenazi neo-Sephardic phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century, it testifies to its own literary voice.

In conclusion, Carlos Moisés Grünberg observed the European catastrophe through a mosaic gaze that promises to traverse the desert left by a dehumanized continent in the present. He does so with a biblical voice in Iberian translation, reclaiming his own presence on American soil and contrary to the contemporary linguicide that are a direct consequence of the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe. His transhistorical, transnational, and transcontinental operation consolidates the emancipatory intellectual role of Latin America as a generator of a – metaphorically speaking – new Jewish grammar that chooses local culture, the singularity of translation, and perseverance on American soil. The obituary sonnet he dedicated to his pair, Alberto Gerchunoff, is the best of testimonies of his neo-Sephardic convincement:

(Somos, Alberto, la sección hispanade los nabíes y de los rabíesque dobla en sus ladinos otrosíesla unicidad jerosolimitana.Somos la cuadratura castellanadel círculo judío, Sinaíesen buen romance, Toras sefardíes,salmos y trenos a la toledana.Tú has sido nuestro sumo sacerdotey has mantenido tu almenar celotesiempre encendido en el turbión opaco.Te vas y por eterna sobrevestenos dejas el taled blanquicelesteque usabas como poncho calamaco.)[We are, Alberto, the Hispanic departmentof the nevi’im and the rabbanimwhich double into its Ladino furthermore the Jerusalem’s oneness.We are the Spanish squaringof the Jewish circle, Sinaisin good Romance, Sephardic Toras,psalms and lamentations in the style of Toledo.You have been our supreme priestand have kept your zealous battlementalways burning in the opaque turmoil.You depart and as an eternal tunicyou inherit us the whitish sky-blue taledthat you used to wear as a gaucho’s poncho.]