Adam Mahler | Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University

I am a specialist in the poetic traditions of medieval/early modern Portugal and Spain. Working comparatively across Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and Ladino/Judeo-Portuguese, I research theories and practices of lyric, rhetoric, and literary criticism. My dissertation traces the impact of ecological exploration and exploitation on poetic form and ethnorepresentative literature in the longue durée. 

 

Though treating a wide range of periods and authors, my published articles and doctoral research converge on the relationship between poetic form, subject formation, and the natural environment. I have also published scholarship on Camilo Pessanha and Fernando Pessoa, two key writers at the head of Portugal's modernist movement in the early twentieth century. I have a longstanding interest in the Portuguese and creole-based literatures of colonial Macau.

 

With an eye towards documenting endangered Jewish languages, I designed and taught Harvard's first-ever Ladino course, LADINO16: Beginning Ladino, a primer in historical Ladino grammar and survey of Sephardic literature produced before and after the inquisition. I welcome contact with scholars and educators interested in promoting and preserving Ladino in its many forms. 

 

As a literary translator from Spanish, Portuguese, and regional Iberian languages,  I am committed to broadening less-known works’ circle of readers; I consider translation to be among the closest forms of reading, and a means for challenging the limits of mainstream reception. You can find my first book of translations, Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra and Other Poems (Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, April 2022), on Bookshop.org or Amazon.  My annotated translation and edition of Shem Tov Ardutiel's Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems Written by Jews is forthcoming with Harvard University Press's Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

 

My research and translations have been supported by grants from the US-Portugal Fulbright Commission, Spain's Ministry of Sport and Culture, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and PEN America. My articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Speculum, Portuguese Studies, Luso-Brazilian Review, La corónica, and Hispanic Review. I am a regular contributor to the Gulbenkian Foundation's Colóquio/Letras, for which I review contemporary Portuguese poetry.