A Paradise With No Country

The edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in northern Mexico is a part of the world in which nothing is what it seems. The Mapimí Silent Zone, a region often known simply as La Zona del Silencio, or the Zone of Silence, is 30 miles of barren brown plains. It’s a wasteland strewn with cosmic debris; compasses go haywire, and cell phones and radios jam. In many ways, this forsaken stretch is Durango’s answer to Area 51 in Nevada or State Route 375, the so-called Extraterrestrial Highway that cuts through miles of empty terrain and is haunted by strange legends. The Zone’s desolation is compounded by Durango’s notorious history of drug trafficking and banditry. In his new collection, Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence (New Directions Press, 2023), the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis describes the area as a “sea of solar silences” marked by “stellar forgettings,” “celestial vessels,” and “irresistible forces” where “only you, creature of the moment, are immune / to those magnetic whirls and disappearances.”

The prolific Aridjis has visited this setting repeatedly over several decades. In his tenth novel, La zona del silencio (2002), a detective yarn that chronicles the life and sudden disappearance of a scientist working in an isolated observatory, the narrator, Juan, tells his lover this:

The Zone of Silence is a realm of the imagination where everything is possible. […] A human eye that watches stars that no longer exist. A vulture rotting on barbed wire. A dry sea. The ear of infinity. The desert that grows day by day. The shadow that walks beside you. Your face when you watch the starry sky. The Zone of Silence is you and I when we fall asleep after making love.

Though it provides a focal point for his romanticism, Aridjis’s Zone is also a space for reckoning: it is populated by drug traffickers, immigration officers, and the unlucky, often innocent, people who get caught between them. The heightened symbolism of this patch of desert lying so close to the militarized border with the United States is not lost on Aridjis; it is what the desperate must cross to get to the imagined Promised Land, and migration is one of the collection’s great concerns. In “Through the Green Door,” Aridjis writes, “I am one of eternity’s illegal aliens. / I have crossed time’s borders without proper papers.” Searched and detained by “the immigration officers of life and death,” he concludes, “Nothing to declare. Nothing to regret. / I have made it through the green door.” Elsewhere, in “I Am an Undocumented in Eternity,” he writes, “The American dream has turned / into a hell of an exile from myself; // to trap me like some extraterrestrial / the migra lies in wait around the corner with its nets.”

Like Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Aridjis’s Zone has one foot in reality and the other in unearthly encounters. Monsters of all sorts, human and supernatural, abound in these poems. In “Mina Harker’s Diary,” inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the eponymous heroine goes searching for “the crypt of the Undead, / the Impaler, the Vampire, the Mosquito King.” The subtext is clear, however. As far as Aridjis is concerned, his vampires are not the caped, fanged villains of horror movies but Mexico’s politicians, greedily bleeding their people dry, one throat at a time.

In “Poet Beatific,” inspired by the time his friend, the San Francisco poet Philip Lamantia, was expelled from Mexico on drug charges, Aridjis writes of “motorcyclists in sunglasses” accompanying the “President of the Republic” in his “motorcade of bulletproof cars”—“solemn vampires” hungry for “human sacrifices in México-Tenochtitlan.” Long fascinated by pre-Columbian mythology—the figures of Quetzalcoatl, Coatlicue, and Huitzilopochtli regularly recur in Aridjis’s poetry, as do mirrors, fantastical animals, and saints—Aridjis here draws a not-so-subtle link between the religious sacrifices that Aztec priests once performed on the steps of their temples and the seemingly endless violence and political dysfunction of modern Mexico. The larger-than-life monsters and gods that Aridjis writes about are bloodthirsty, but ultimately, whatever hell exists on Earth, humans created it themselves, a point he makes explicit in “Discreation”:

Somewhere, at some moment
a deranged Godzilla and a maddened Batman
pitched nuclear strikes at one another.
All of it was brief.
The Apocalypse shall be the work of man, not of God.

Aridjis composed many of these poems while under lockdown in Mexico City during the early days of the pandemic. Though it’s natural to assume that his preoccupation with death reflected each day’s headlines, the subject has been a touchstone throughout his career, no doubt partly due to his near-brush with death at age 10, when he accidentally shot himself in the stomach while playing with his older brother’s shotgun. 

This collection includes routine visits from the inhabitants of what Aridjis has called his “garden of ghosts,” as in “The Ghost of My Brother Juan,” whose speaker runs into his departed sibling wearing his “dead-man’s suit” in a country where corruption “is more immortal than the taco / and only the faces of the corrupt change.” Even Aridjis’s old friends, such as Jorge Luis Borges, are portrayed as silent and inscrutable as any other distant deity, as in “Borges in front of the Mirror”:

The garden smelled of roses.
After a few minutes,
the blind author rose from the chair
and brought his face to the mirror
without seeing himself.
Then, he ran his hand
over the flat pane
and felt the cold looking glass.
Then, returned to the chair.

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. As the poem opens, the author stares into a mirror but sees only the reflection of a “comical skull” laughing at itself; his body has been painted with “the insignia of Tezcatlipoca,” the Aztec god of war, and “the smoking mirror,” a reference to the polished obsidian mirrors Aztecs used during religious ceremonies. “I would have been forty when this took place in the desert” the speaker continues. “The winds of the soul told no hour and at the speed of forgetting / they ran through the darkness at one hundred kilometers per hour.” The poem obliquely recalls John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” another work in which the act of examining oneself becomes a pretext for various tangents and, perhaps most important, visions. “The house among the dunes had a door that opened onto the infinite,” Aridjis writes, “beneath a searing sun that never set.” As Ashbery did, Aridjis stands by his belief that poems should embrace inscrutability, and in this poem, he makes it plain why he has gone into this desert, although that’s where the clarity stops.

My lips burned and like tequila desire provoked violence
and lust in me for no reason. So, face to face with myself
I traced my way through labyrinths, anxieties, wrinkles, eyes and ears,
 
jawbones, eyelashes. Insects within and without
had entered through the glass-free windshield of my body,
and in the vertigo of my-self I was alone with my mind.

Though there is no denouement, the poem does conclude with a more optimistic vision than is typical for Aridjis: “At the foot of life and death’s double pyramid, / the god Quetzalcoatl offered flowers and butterflies / to his followers in place of human flesh. // And amid such splendor, only the sadness was mine.”

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. However, this edition suffers from the structural and linguistic deficiencies of George McWhirter’s English translations. Consider, for example, “Meeting With My Father in the Orchard,” the collection’s second poem. McWhirter’s translation begins, “Past noon. Past the cinema / with the tall sorrowful walls / on the point of coming down.” The original Spanish-language version, printed en face, begins, “Pasado el mediodía. Pasado el cine, / con sus altos muros pesarosos / a punto de venirse abajo.” McWhirter’s first mistake is failing to recognize that sus is a possessive adjective, meaning, quite literally, its. Therefore, “Pasado el cine, / con sus altos muros” should be “Past the cinema / with its tall walls.” Though walls can “come down,” can’t they simply fall or crumble? Might the walls be gloomy rather than sorrowful? The latter is apparently the translator’s attempt to create some alliterative momentum with tall / wall / sorrowful, which is entirely absent in the original Spanish.

McWhirter’s chief problem is his inconsistency. At times, he insists on exactly mirroring the syntax of the original Spanish; on other occasions, he deviates from the script for no discernible reason. A later line in “Meeting With My Father” offers a case in point. Aridjis writes, “Mi madre ha muerto. Los hijos han envejecido.” McWhirter translates this as “My mother has died, the children, grown old.” Why join separate sentences in this manner, especially when it makes the line sound syntactically unnatural in English? The Spanish line reads, “The children have grown old,” although McWhirter omits the verb entirely.

Other choices are even odder. A line from “Self-Portrait at Age Eighty” reads, “Hay paraísos que no tienen país’,” which, word-for-word, means, “There are paradises that have no country.” That’s perfectly fine when literally rendered into English. Instead, McWhirter translates it as “Paradises there are that have no country.” That isn’t just a bad translation; it’s a bad line. It adopts an object–verb–subject pattern that makes Aridjis sound like Yoda from Star Wars when the poem is in fact beautifully plainspoken from beginning to end.

Fortunately, McWhirter didn’t translate all the poems in the collection. Betty Ferber, Aridjis’s wife, translated “The Violence in Mexico Began with the Gods” and “We Are Children of Cruel Gods,” two poems that retain the rhythm of the originals while sounding unforced in English. Here’s the former:

The violence in Mexico began with the gods.
Before there were cities and temples
there were quarterings, flayings, and beheadings
in the rites at dawn. The Painal,
executioner for our lord Huitzilopochtli,
was already descending from the hills,
a smoking heart cupped in his hands.

Aridjis himself translated “The First Dream,” a single quatrain that is the book’s shortest poem:

Against political harassment,
against criminal violence,
against fear
I built a wall of poetry.

The collection also includes “The Creation of the World by the Animals,” a version by the acclaimed Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, which like all good versions, sounds like both authors, serving as a reminder of the creative possibilities inherent to such collaborations. It begins:

Across an empty darkness, across unmoving sky,
flashed scarlet macaw —
so day broke; and yellow orioles with turquoise eyes
began dancing a solo of light

In versions, the translator, who may or may not speak the language in question, diverges from the original to create what is, in essence, a new poem. The translator expands the original to contain material that may not have been present, as against strict translations, which are styled as faithful reproductions of an original poem into another language.

The author of more than 40 books, Aridjis has often been called Mexico’s greatest living writer and a national treasure, but much of his vast oeuvre remains untranslated in English. One can only hope for a Collected Poems or at least a career-spanning Selected. Until then, this volume is a useful introduction, and readers can also turn to the work of Aridjis’s various family members—his finest translators—who have brought some of his prose into English. His daughter, the writer Chloe Aridjis, translated his memoir, The Child Poet (2016), and Ferber translated two of his novels: 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile (1991) and The Lord of the Last Days: Visions of the Year 1000 (1995) as well as News of the Earth (2017), a collection of his environmental writings. Having reached a grand old age, Aridjis shows no signs of slowing. He concludes in “Self-Portrait at Age Eighty” that

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.