Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence

by Homero Aridjis, George McWhirter (Translator)

Overview

An exciting new collection of poems by “one of the Spanish-speaking world’s greatest living writers” (LA Review of Books)

WINNER OF THE 2024 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by the renowned Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, is a brilliant collection of poems written in and for the new century. Aridjis seeks spiritual transformation through encounters with mythical animals, family ghosts, migrant workers, Mexico’s oppressed, female saints, other writers (such as 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 imaginary landscapes. As Aridjis himself writes: “a poem is like a door / we’ve never passed through...” And 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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811231732
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	1,048,330
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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.

George McWhirter is an Irish-Canadian writer, translator, editor, teacher and Vancouver's first Poet Laureate. He has translated works by Mario Arregui, Carlos Fuentes, and José Emilio Pacheco.

Editorial Reviews

"Homero Aridjis’s poems open a door into the light."

Seamus Heaney

"In his vast oeuvre, Aridjis has produced many works that confront apocalyptic times."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Carlos Fonseca

"Aridjis’ work casts a beguiling spell that blurs the line between dreaming and waking."

Harvard Review - Chard deNiord

"Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence brings poet-translator George McWhirter’s adept English to the service of a great world-poet, Homero Aridjis. The book’s enchanting variety of tones and subjects expresses a rounded human being engaged with our total experience, from the familial to the political, from bodily sensations to dream, vision, philosophic thought, and history, from hope to foreboding. A keynote is the sense of a person speaking with us plainly and yet from kinship with a light that bathes, and springs from, each thing."

judges’ citation

"Aridjis is a poet of great vitality and originality."

W. S. Merwin

"Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, which includes selections from Aridjis’s four most recent collections, along with previously unpublished poetry, is a significant addition to an already important body of work.... The collection’s title poem will likely endure as one of the great gems that the now 82-year-old Aridjis produced in his late period. It’s simultaneously philosophical and surreal but nonetheless retains an intense sensuality and presence of being that anchors it in earthly realities."

André Naffis-Sahely

"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."

Yves Bonnefoy

"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."

Yvonne Bonnefoy