Bøger af Homero Aridjis

WINNER OF THE 2024 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZESelf-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."

Las horas pasaban como fuera de larealidad, en un espacio habitado por elrecuerdo y la locura, donde lo pretâeritoestaba vivo y los difuntos eran espâiritusconcupiscentes. Un joven de dieciocho aänos llega a la ciudad de Mâexico con la secreta intenciâon de convertirse en poeta. Es el final de la dâecada de los cincuenta. Al poco tiempo, comienza a involucrarse en la intensa vida cultural de la capital. Asâi, se adentra en un mundo de talleres y tertulias, de complicidades sinceras y envidias aâun mâas hondas, cafâes y torneos de ajedrez,de intrigas amorosas, vanidades y -a pesar o por encima de todo- de pasiâon verdadera por la creaciâon literaria. El joven habrâa de convertirse, efectivamente, en poeta y en uno de los protagonistas de la literatura mexicana del siglo xx. Tambiâen, circularmente, en el autor de esta novela. Por ella pasan personajes que conociâo de cerca, como gente cotidiana en un ambiente cotidiano, no como monumentos: Juan Josâe Arreola, Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Elena Garro, Amparo Dâavila,Gabriel Garcâia Mâarquez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Philip Lamantia, Francisco Toledo, Luis Buänuel, Nahui Olin, entre muchos otros. Los peones son el alma del juego, obra que comenzâo como un diario secreto, es el vivo retrato del Mâexico de una âepoca. Es tambiâen una lâudica novela en la que el ajedrez opera como una metâafora de la vid

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

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 northwest 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 22known 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 cityin particular, the Greek and Armenian quartersby 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 irregulars 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 to take refugees 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.

An extraordinary compendium of activism and writings about the natural world by Homero Aridjis, Mexico's greatest living writer.

Poems of surrealism by Mexico's famed poet-diplomat, in the tradition of Octavio Paz.