Homero Aridjis

Selected Poems

Eyes to See Otherwise/Ojos De Otro Mira

Esin Talu-Çelikkan

bin yılın vahiyleri

Son günlerin efendisi

Perséfone

The seventeen poems gathered in this pocket book, selected by the author, have been brought together as introduction to a body of work spanning thirty years. The poems are rendered in the original Spanish, with English translations on the facing pages.

An Angel Speaks

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

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence

"In the poetry of Homero Ardjis there is...he discontinuous time of practical and rational life..." -Octavio Paz

Exaltation of Light

«Las horas pasaban como fuera de la realidad, en un espacio habitado por el recuerdo y la locura, donde lo pretérito estaba vivo y los difuntos eran espíritus concupiscentes.» Un joven de dieciocho años llega a la ciudad de México con la secreta intención de convertirse en poeta. Es el final de la década de los cincuenta. Al poco tiempo, comienza a involucrarse en la intensa vida cultural de la capital. Así, se adentra en un mundo de talleres y tertulias, de complicidades sinceras y envidias aún más hondas, cafés y torneos de ajedrez,de intrigas amorosas, vanidades y -a pesar o por encima de todo- de pasión verdadera por la creación literaria. El joven habrá de convertirse, efectivamente, en poeta y en uno de los protagonistas de la literatura mexicana del siglo xx. También, circularmente, en el autor de esta novela. Por ella pasan personajes que conoció de cerca, como gente cotidiana en un ambiente cotidiano, no como monumentos: Juan José Arreola, Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Elena Garro, Amparo Dávila, Gabriel García Márquez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Philip Lamantia, Francisco Toledo, Luis Buñuel, Nahui Olin, entre muchos otros. Los peones son el alma del juego, obra que comenzó como un diario secreto, es el vivo retrato del México de una época. Es también una lúdica novela en la que el ajedrez opera como una metáfora de la vida. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION “The hours passed as if separate from reality, in a space inhabited by memory and madness, where the past was very much alive and the deceased were sensual spirits.” An eighteen-year-old young man arrives in Mexico City with the secret intention of becoming a poet. It is the end of the fifties. Before long, he begins to partake and be part of the intense cultural life the capital has to offer. Thus, he enters a world of workshops and gatherings, of genuine camaraderie but with even deeper jealousies, cafes and chess tournaments, love intrigues, vanities and —despite or above all—true passion for literary creation. That young man would indeed become a poet and one of the protagonists of twentieth-century Mexican literature; and coming full circle, the author of this novel. Characters that he knew closely cross these pages as everyday people in an everyday environment, not as the literary greats they were: Juan José Arreola, Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Elena Garro, Amparo Dávila, Gabriel García Márquez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Philip Lamantia, Francisco Toledo, Luis Buñuel, and Nahui Olin, among many others. The Pawns Are the Soul of the Game, a work that began as his private diary, is the living portrait of Mexico of a past era. It is also a playful novel inwhich chess functions as a metaphor for life.

Los peones son el alma del juego / The Pawns Are the Soul of the Game

This powerful and moving historical novel is inspired by the written recollections and the memories that haunted the author's father, Nicias Aridjis,--a captain in the Greek army, who returned from the fields of battle to Smyrna, 50 miles southeast of his hometown of Tire, in 1922 just as Turkish forces captured this cosmopolitan port city. Smyrna in Flames , by the internationally acclaimed Mexican writer and poet Homero Aridjis, lays bare the unimaginable events and horrors that took place for nine days between September 13 and 22--known as the Smyrna Catastrophe. After capturing Smyrna, Turkish forces went on a rampage, torturing and massacring tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians and devastating the city--in particular, the Greek and Armenian quarters--by deliberately setting disastrous fires. After years of fighting in World War I and the Greco-Turkish War, Nicias enters a Smyrna under siege. He desperately moves through the city in search of Eurydice, the love of his life whom he left behind. Wandering the streets, the sounds of hopelessness commingle in his mind with echoes of the ancient Greek poets who sang of the city's past glories. Images and voices, suggestive of Homeric ghosts adrift in a catastrophic scenario, conjure up a mythological, historical, geographical quest that, in the manner of classical epic, hovers between the heroic and the horrible, illustrating the depths and depravity of the human soul. Making his way from district to district, evading capture, Nicias observes the last vestiges of normal life and witnesses unspeakable horrors committed by roaming Turkish forces and partisans who are randomly abusing and raping Greek and Armenian women and torturing and murdering their men. What he experiences is literally a living hell unfolding before his eyes. As Nicias passes familiar buildings, cafes, and churches, his mind and soul fill with nostalgia for his earlier life and the promise of love. Fortunately for the reader, the brutal and bloodthirsty scenes of the Smyrna Catastrophe are leavened by the voice of this "visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces," as Kenneth Rexroth has described Aridjis. His portrayal of a genocide-in-progress floods our senses, turning these chaotic scenes into a poignant drama. At the very end, aboard one of the last ships out of Smyrna before its final fall, Nicias scours the throng of thousands of desperate Greeks and Armenians pressing forward to escape on already overcrowded ships. Suddenly Turkish forces move in to shoot and stab, and, overwhelmed by the all-pervasive tragedy, Nicias abandons Smyrna and Asia Minor forever. Nicias is not a historian, he is an eyewitness and a survivor, and while the book is written in the context of his personal experiences, knowledge and conjectures of the events of the time, Nicias's son Homero has enriched the narrative with plausible fictional episodes and reports by journalists and written testimony by men and women who lived through the Smyrna Catastrophe.

Smyrna in Flames, a Novel

«Adiós, voy a encontrarme conmigo mismo.» Como en Anatomía de la melancolía de Robert Burton, hay una biblioteca personal en este libro, en él desfilan maestros antiguos y modernos, visiones míticas, místicas y cabalísticas; sabidurías orientales y occidentales. En El testamento del Dragón aparecen aforismos, antiaforismos y metaforismos, citas propias y ajenas, opinionessociales, morales y ecológicas; herencias poéticas grecolatinas, hispánicas y europeas, fragmentos de presocráticos, discursos prestados y discursos propios. Como en el caso similar de Erasmo, quien diciendo "no soy yo el que habla, sino Democritus dixit", el autor habla de si mismo, recurre a su experiencia y existencia. Este libro es el testimonio del conocimiento y de las dudas existenciales del escritor Homero Aridjis; es su testamento literario, su visión poética del hombre y del mundo. En su intento de expresarse, humildemente, el autor es aquel que, para afirmarse y conocerse, necesita de las grandes voces del pasado, se llena de sabiduría prestada para hallar su propia voz, para llenar su propio vasto vacío.

El testamento del Dragón

No confíe en nadie, ni en usted mismo. Hay un país en el que resulta difícil distinguir entre las fuerzas del bien y las del mal, y en el que a veces se tiene más miedo de la policía que de los delincuentes. En ese territorio hostil, un periodista vive terribles experiencias: es amenazado de muerte, le secuestran a la esposa, es testigo de atrocidades dignas del inframundo y es hostigado por los guardaespaldas que, se supone, deberían proteger su integridad física y velar por su seguridad. Todo es incierto, menos la posibilidad de morir con violencia, con las orejas mutiladas por un secuestrador que (la sospecha tiene sólidos fundamentos) probablemente es cómplice de los guardaespaldas, si no es que de plano su socio comercial en un gran corporativo enloquecido: Nadie es inocente ni culpable, sino todo lo contrario. No existen los ángeles del cielo, todo el mundo es un criminal en potencia. Los asesinos acechan en la calle,desde una puerta o desde una ventana. O en el mejor de los casos se hacen guajes parados delante de un escaparate, esperan el momento de accionar el gatillo. No importa el sexo, la condición social ni la expresión ingenua. La cara más tierna puede albergar a un asesino.

Sicarios

Quemar las naves

Eyes To See Otherwise is the first extensive selection of poems by leading Mexican poet Homero Aridjis to appear in English. 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.

Eyes to See Otherwise

Mirándola dormir ; Perséfone

Part picaresque novel, part moving romance, part historical document, this extraordinary reconstruction of fifteenth-century Spain has been acclaimed throughout Europe and Latin America. Award-winning Mexican writer Homero Aridjis depicts a world in which both the Moors and the Jews are under attack. Now available for the first time in an American paperback edition, this book will find a broad audience among readers fascinated by this aspect of Jewish history.

The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile

1492

Homero Aridjis has always said that he was born twice. The first time was to his mother in April 1940 and the second time was as a poet, in January 1951. His life was distinctly cleaved in two by an accident. Before that fateful Saturday he was carefree and confident, the youngest of five brothers growing up in the small Mexican village of Contepec, Michoacán. After the accident - in which he nearly died on the operating table after shooting himself with a shotgun his brothers had left propped against the bedroom wall - he became a shy, introspective child who spent afternoons reading Homer and writing poems and stories at the dining room table instead of playing soccer with his classmates. After the accident his early childhood became like a locked garden. But in 1971, when his wife became pregnant with their first daughter, the memories found a way out. Visions from this elusive period started coming back to him in astonishingly vivid dreams, giving shape to what would become The Child Poet. Aridjis is joyously imaginative. The Child Poet has urgency but still takes its time, celebrating images and feelings and the strangeness of childhood. Readers will love being in the world he has created. Aridjis paints the pueblo of Cotepec -- the landscape, the campesinos, the Church, the legacy of the Mexican Revolution -- through the eyes of a sensitive child.

Homero Aridjis

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