Ladino love poem

Here is a very nice translation of my love poem, with an alphabet which is for us very mysterious. This Ladino (Judeo español calco, Judeo Spanish, Djudesmo, Judezmo, Djudezmo, Judaeo-Spanish) poem, is in a language created by the Spanish rabbis in the Middle Ages on a background of Hebrew and old Castilian.

It is intended to a Sephardic woman who will surely recognize herself. Her stick of lipstick is her secret, her weapon of seduction. It is with it that she writes her poems!

The Ladino is a Romance language with Spanish origin, spoken by the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492.

As the Iberian Jews were mainly located in Castile, it is above all this Castilian Jew with Hebrew-Aramaic, Greek-Latin and Ibero-Arabic Jewish contributions which, in addition to non-Castilian Hispanic languages, will make Ladino.

Cut from an evolving Spanish, the Jews have retained a state of archaic language that reflects the phonetics, morphology and Syntax of the 15th century Castilian: for example, "f" and "g" appear when modern Spanish has a "h" not pronounced (fablar vs hablar, agora vs ahora).

There has been a growing gulf, varying according to the host country, between the spoken language and the language of profane and sacred literature. Influenced by the languages with which it was in contact, the Ladino acquired a number of phonetic, morphological and especially lexical characteristics: the borrowings were integrated in a Hebraised or, on the contrary, Hispanized form.

Texts and poetic forms appear in the 16th century to really develop when the 18th century begins. The Ladino is most often written in Hebrew characters but since the 19th century the use of the Latin alphabet began to spread.

Spoken in the Jewish communities around the Mediterranean the Ladino which has a few thousand speakers, but most of the time already old, is declining.

Let us hope that the current attempts, notably in Israel, to teach and study it, will give a new impetus, sufficient to inspire the creation of new works to keep it alive and preserve its important oral literature.

Actually, the 4 verses of this poem could be understood in the Balkans (Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria), Turkey, Israel, France, USA and Latin America.