George McWhirter

George McWhirter shared the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize with Chinua Achebe in 1972 for Catalan Poems (Oberon Press). His own poetry is anthologized in The Penguin Book Of Canadian Verse And Irish Writing In The Twentieth Century (Cork University Press). He has translated and published prose by Marco Denevi, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Arregui, and the following books from the Spanish: The Selected Poems Of José Emilio Pachecho (New Directions), which won the F.R. Scott Prize for Translation; Eyes To See Otherwise: The Selected Poems Of Homero Aridjis (Carcanet and New Directions), Solar Poems by Homero Aridjis (City Lights) and A Time Of Angels (Fondo de Cultura Económica and City Lights, 2012). An anthology of contemporary Mexican poetry, Where Words Like Monarchs Fly, which he edited, appeared from Anvil Press in 2000; his version of Hecuba by Euripides was produced by Blackbird Theatre at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in 2009, one of his projects as Vancouver’s Inaugural Poet Laureate from 2007 – 2009.

Eyes To See Otherwise

Eyes to See Otherwise is the first widely representative selection by Mexico’s greatest living poet to be published in a bilingual edition. The range and quality of the translations, by some of America’s finest poets, mark the centrality of his work on the map of modern poetry. Homero Aridjis’s sources range from Nahuatl chants and Huichol initiation songs to San Juan de la Cruz and the 16th-century Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote.…
More Information

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence

Poetry by Homero Aridjis

Translated from the Spanish by George McWhirter

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by the renowned Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, is a brilliant collection of recent poems. Aridjis seeks spiritual transformation through encounters with mythical animals, family ghosts, Mexico’s oppressed, female saints, writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Philip Lamantia, and naked angels in the metro. We find tributes to Goya and Heraclitus, denunciations of drug traffickers and political figureheads, and unforgettable imagined landscapes. As Aridjis himself writes, “A poem is like a door /we’ve never passed through.…
More Information
< Vincent McHugh Douglas Messerli >