The Role of Translation in Shaping the Ladino Novel At the Time of Westernization in the Ottoman Empire (A Case Study: Hasan-pasha and Pavlo y Virzhinia)

Abstract

Sephardic literature in the Ottoman Empire was born soon after the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. It went through various stages and died in the 20th century with the emergence of nation-states. The Holocaust dealt it the last blow. But before this literature perished, it had a last period of bloom. The last third of the 19th century witnessed the birth of secular mass literature in the vernacular, where the leading role belonged to the novel. The very genres in which Ladino secular literature was written had no counterpart in previous epochs, deriving instead from European literary experience. Thus, the majority of Ladino novels, without being translations proper, were to a varying degree dependent on foreign-language sources, which became an important factor in the formation of the genre. In this paper, I explore the function of translated literature in the development of the Ladino novel. After a description of the study's historical and theoretical framework, I go on to analyze two sample texts. One of them has an obvious foreign original, while the other is believed to be an original Ladino creation. I argue that both texts were produced by means of amalgamation of domestic and imported elements, where foreign sources serve as catalysts.