A great flame passes through the words, the poetry, of Homero Aridjis, who sets reality alight in images that at once illuminate and consume it, making life a sister of dream. Homero is a great poet; our century has great need of him.
One of Latin America’s foremost literary figures, Homero Aridjis was born in Contepec, Michoacán, Mexico. He has written fifty-one books of poetry and prose and won many important literary prizes. Formerly the Mexican ambassador to Switzerland, the Netherlands, and UNESCO, he is the president emeritus of PEN International. He is founder and president of the Group of 100, an environmentalist association of writers, artists, and scientists.
Translated 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.” Now past eighty, Aridjis reflects on the past and ponders the future. “Surrounded by light and the warbling of birds,” he writes, “I live in a state of poetry, because for me, being and making poetry are the same.”
Edited by George McWhirter and Betty Ferber
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. He is, in the words of translator George McWhirter, “a troubadour of love for lost environments, a voice in the wilderness of Mexico City and Mexico.” Included in this selection are poems by Aridjis evoking his own life, present and past, his memories always sticking close to his birthplace Contepec, where, on Altamirano Hill, the Monarch butterflies arrive each year. This long awaited Selected Poems enables the reader to witness, from the 1960 collection The Eyes of a Double Vision to new unpublished poems, the poetic and personal evolution of this “visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces” (Kenneth Rexroth).
A great flame passes through the words, the poetry, of Homero Aridjis, who sets reality alight in images that at once illuminate and consume it, making life a sister of dream. Homero is a great poet; our century has great need of him.
Aridjis is a poet of great vitality and originality.
In his vast oeuvre, Aridjis has produced many works that confront apocalyptic times.
Homero Aridjis’s poems open a door into the light.
