Living ‘in a state of poetry’

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence 
by Homero Aridjis / translated by George McWhirter

New York: New Directions, 2023
$28.95 / 9780811231732

Reviewed by Gary Geddes

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George McWhirter, a fine poet, gifted translator, former professor of Creative Writing at UBC, and Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate, has long been enamoured of some of the best poets in the Spanish language, especially those with roots in Latin America. Homero Aridjis is one of those fortunate poets, a man whose career opportunities made the link between poetry and politics inescapable.

Aridjis (Eyes to See Otherwise) served as Mexico’s cultural attaché to the Netherlands and ambassador to Switzerland and UNESCO, but eventually stepped away from official positions that oblige you to lie on behalf of your government.

At last, he was able to pursue full time his joint passions for the environment and poetry. He served as president of PEN International and spoke forcefully about the threat to sea turtles, monarch butterflies, and endangered forests; and he founded the gathering of a hundred artists and scientists known as Grupo de los Cien, to advance those and other environmental concerns. His activism made him a target, so he was obliged for a time to have a bodyguard for protection from criminals and vested interests. 

I’ve known George (The Anachronicles) for half a century and I met Homero and his talented, activist wife Betty Ferber when I passed through Mexico City doing research into the likelihood of pre-Columbian Asian contact with the Americas. I mention this to acknowledge the possible biases in what follows. 

I can’t resist starting with the first poem in Self-Portrait titled “The Jaguar,” which begins with this iconic animal’s gradual disappearance:

That one who was the image of rain
no longer leaves trails through the jungle,
the gold discs of his eyes
no longer blink brightly.

He isn’t to be seen
in the morning sun floating on a log
down the Sacred Monkey River.
His solar pelt is a rug.

The heart of the mountain no longer wears
black-and-white markings on its chest
nor does the volute, cloud of speech that names things
scroll from his molten jaws.

His mute cry
booms out
my extinction.

There is a seeming ambiguity here, where the possessive pronoun shifts from His to my, which suggests the jaguar is announcing its own demise, but, on closer observation, the adjective mute indicates that the jaguar’s cry goes unheard, so we are forced to assume it’s the speaker’s extinction that is implicit. The poem then shifts into aspects of jaguar mythology touching on the gradual loss of its mystical powers, including its symbolic link to the human subconscious, so the poems ends with a clear indication that the jaguar’s demise has created an imbalance in nature that has left us unhinged and clawing at each other, a powerful reminder that our survival depends on acknowledging and celebrating our interconnectivity. 

Much of the work in this fascinating gathering from a life’s work explores the borderline between dreams and reality, between the living and the dead, targeting the narcos, hit-men, politicians, rapists and killer patrolmen of the “predator city,” where there are the assassinated but, apparently, no assassins, a condition that makes life impossible and guarantees “the infinite sadness of God.” 

In “First Dream,” Aridjis tells us that “Against political harassment, / against criminal violence, / against fear / I built a wall of poetry,” a barrier that makes it possible to survive in “the game of love and death.”

“Epitaph for a Tyrant” serves well as a description of Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu. “Mexican / Deer” is a powerful but brief depiction of the eternal refugee, too often found “pedalling trinkets” or “chanced upon in garbage dumps car trunks / murdered wrapped in blankets his heart torn out” thanks, of course, to the usual suspects: “politicians, police and hoodlums.” Alas, the poet concludes, “We are the parents of cruel gods.”

Although my Spanish vocabulary is limited, my grasp of the language is sufficient to rejoice at McWhirter’s virtuoso translations, with two tiny quibbles. In “The Mysterious Bermuda Triangle,” some of the tension is lost in the final four couplets by ending one line with the adverb up, and choosing “without a trace or any remorse” instead of “without a trace or drop of remorse.” And, even more arbitrary, in “Driver Death” some power seems to me sacrificed by translating “La muerte arranca” as “Death / puts the pedal to the metal.” Given the black humour of the poem, however, I suspect that Homero greeted that translation with an appreciative laugh.

The book concludes with two self-portraits, including the title poem, which offers a surreal and Bosch-like desert vision, a fleshless eye socket through which an empty train is passing, human hearts drying on the needles of a nopal cactus, the speaker’s translucent skin through which insects are crawling in and out, a nightmarish dream vision, but one that ends with the god Quetzalcoatl “offering flowers and butterflies” instead of human flesh.

The second self-portrait, written at age eighty, and one of Aridjis’ most famous and endearing poems, bypasses the familiar and disturbing dream-zones, focussing instead on intimate human relations, these deregulated paradises of family and nature that nourish us and celebrate “the tremendous everydayness of the mystery.” The evocation that follows ends the book and is a good note on which to begin to wind down this brief review of a rich, complex, and challenging book:

Surrounded by light and the warbling of birds,
I live in a state of poetry,
because for me, being and making poetry are the same.
For that I would want, in these final days,
like Titian, to depict the human body one more time.
Dust I shall be, but dust in love.

This publication is another great moment in terms of translation. For too long translators have been viewed as handmaidens in the service of literature, not as literary creators themselves. McWhirter’s version of Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence receiving the Griffin Prize indicates, as did Heather McHugh’s and Nikolai Popov’s Griffin-winning translation of the poems of Paul Celan in 2015, that translation is henceforth to be viewed as original creation.

I was able, recently, to share this good news at a translation panel at Poetry International in Rotterdam. It does, however, raise an interesting question about the fairness of the wonderful and much-admired Griffin Prize, which demands that Canadians and other poets who write in English submit only new work, while the translated books of poets in other languages can include the best poems of a lifetime. I hope this is something that will be given careful consideration in the future.

Gary Geddes has written and edited more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, and criticism. A translator and anthologist, he’s been the recipient of a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas region), the Lt. Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile. He lives on Thetis Island.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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