MY TRAVELS IN VERSE

When I was five years old, I was traumatized by coming from a small village on the shores of the Belfast Lough to the big city of Belfast. It was my first big migration, and the year was 1945. Yearly, I would make the same journey to spend summer in Carnalea and winters in Belfast. As a child I was, as they say in Ireland, a little light in the head. One morning in the spring of 1947, I felt the spring in me and summer on the horizon. On the way to our morning toilet, a collective visit to a line of gruesome loos, I began to flit on my feet, waving my arms like a butterfly. For this I was stood in front of the whole school.

This was my first identification with the brilliant insect and the doom that would descend for thinking I was one. It would be forty years before I would meet a man, a fellow poet, who would defend the doomed butterflies in his village of Contapec, by the hill of Altamirano, where he and the butterflies came to be together, each year.

Obviously, what I have to say about my Mexican Latin American connections has a great deal to do with correspondences across time and space. Homero Aridjis, the Mexican poet and present president of PEN International, was waking to his awareness of poetry and butterflies in those same years that I wanted to be one, flying to my seaside village of Carnalea.

But how did I come to fly into Spanish, and back and forth between the two languages as a translator? Let me confess I was brought up in a great ignorance of my own history and sensibility. An Ulster protestant is brought up with an image of virtue as being puritan, tough, anti-papish, anti-Roman Catholic, and Spanish would be…Spanish speakers were…on the top rung of papist and Roman Catholic thinkers.  However, I was fascinated by things I was supposed to have nothing to do with, and when I was given a choice in Grammar School, which I went to after taking the 11+ examination in 1949, and being intellectually separated from my class—yes, even worse than being a culturally constipated Prod, I was from the Shankill Road, and a barbarian…well, in Grammar School, I was given a choice between German and Spanish as a third language.  Madame Lilly (Lilly was the surname), the Head of Latin Languages, who knew us all through French language instruction from the age of 12 on, suggested German as more appropriate to our/my guttural and coarse Shankill Road accent—we all spoke and sounded like little Hitlers in a hurry, paranoid and belligerent at the same time. However, I chose Spanish.

Grammar School also represented a daily physical migration as well as an intellectual one. I had to cross from the Shankill, through the Falls Road, over to the Grosvenor Road, where the school of the same name, Grosvenor High School, was. I passed daily through the hub of an alien sensibility, dripping with tricolors and silk banners for bishops’ and popes’ birthdays. Daily, from the age of fourteen, I studied Spanish and another alien sensibility. Daily, I began to swim in the Falls Road Baths (it was the nearest)…in the swim with Fenians, Republicans and Roman Catholics, sharing water with them.

Then, at the age of sixteen, I was given the new Oxford Book of Spanish Verse, selection by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, F.B.A., as a text to study for the Advanced Senior examination. The level, equivalent to first-year university or Grade 13.  At that same time, and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, José Emilio Pacheco was reading many of the poets I was reading for the first time—Gongora, Darío, Machado, Lorca, Guillen, Alberti—and wanting to write like all of them, which he eventually would. I was subject to those same influences and same wishes, reading more contemporary Spanish poets than I had ever read in English—Eliot was the only modern on our examination diet.

So, quite simply, I was shaped more by Spanish poets than by English. I was given translations of Gongora, Darío, Lorca, Guillen, Alberti as exercises. I memorized their poems. I imitated Spanish actors reciting their poems, but so far I was a very parochial papillon, a stuck-in-the-mud mariposa, whose migrations were from Belfast to Carnalea, from high Spanish poetry to my early lousy literal English translations, from the loyalist Shankill through the republican Falls to the Grosvenor Road.

It took a wife with no patience for Ulster protestant narrow-mindedness and parochialism to drag me out and into the air and light of Spain. We lived in Barcelona; Franco was still in power, and the Catalans convinced us it would be chaos when Franco died. The old republican/fascist-monarchist clash would start up again.  We had had a lot of that, already. There, in Barcelona, we received letters from a friend in Vancouver, Canada, about a place where no building was more than 50 years old, and the mountains were the palaces.

We migrated to the Americas, and to the loyalist, parliamentary part with a constitutional monarchy. The other republican sensibilities and the Spanish-speaking people would once again lie elsewhere, to the south, on the other side of yet another republic. This I would have to cross to get the place filled with poetry as influenced as I was by the great verb wizards, Gongora and Darío. And, dare I confess it, some of the baroque sensibility I was born with, but whose name I would never speak or identify as a young boy.

Flighty, too ornamental—too image heavy, I got those criticisms. What can I say? Once a butterfly, always a butterfly. At the same time, like the butterfly I am/was possessed of an extravagant shyness, the colourful wings are for camouflage, are they not? Then, when I came across my first Latin American poet in Vancouver, I would find that he too was possessed of the same extravagant shyness.

With José Emilio Pacheco, it was a true case of correspondence.

J. Michael Yates, one of my teachers at UBC and a master of made-in-BC literary adventures, telephoned and jawboned me into contacting this mysterious Mexican poet who was in Hispanic & Italian Studies at UBC for a year. The year was 1968. Mike wanted me to translate some of this poet’s work for Volvox, an anthology of Poetry from the Unofficial Languages of Canada…in English Translation. José Emilio Pacheco had lived in Toronto with Cristina, his wife, on their first Canadian sojourn, and there his first daughter was born. Being too indirect and dilatory to phone or jawbone face-to-face like JMY, I wrote to the poet, whose office was across the quad from our own at UBC. I also made inquiries of those I knew in Hispanic & Italian Studies. “The poet’s laundry had to be rescued from its dirt,” I was told by one, a fellow Mexican, friendly with the poet. —how rescued?—By his Mexican friend showing the poet, José Emilio Pacheco, how to take the plunge and push the buttons of the washer in the Acadia Camp laundrette.

My kind of poet.

I translated three poems by this poet, whom Octavio Paz has called “Dr. Pangloss in reverse.” In the worst of all possible worlds, where washing machines are incorrigible non-starters, its timorous observers, Pacheco and McWhirter, corresponded.  When José Emilio departed homeward, letters vanished into the maw of Mexico City (stamps would get torn off—they were too often more valuable than pesos) and would (or would not) arrive at Reynosa 63, where he has lived forever with his wife, Cristina.

We did finally arrange to meet at the Hotel Geneva, Mexico City, in 1975—before our descent (wife, self and two kids) to Cuautla, Morelos, where we would live and I would come up 3,000 feet to the capital every two weeks to meet and eat with him over my translations.

But on that first occasion to meet and eat, this huge man bustled in the lobby of the Hotel Geneva with books, which he switched from hand to hand. The kids looked up at the great shoulders and head of jet-black hair: a monolithic, Olmec Man who contained this other, swift-talking, often slurring Spaniard. The books, which switched hands, were brought close to his nose, like smelling salts to revive him. He apologized more than a Canadian, and when he ate, our children, Angela, and I watched in wonder at the speed of his spoon and the intake of soup.

“Four hundred years of hunger,” he said in Spanish. José Emilio Pacheco had inherited the empty stomach of every Mexican that the Spanish had starved since 1500, but JEP’s greater craving is for books, which he stuffs into his house, as if making up for a 4000-year biblio-famine.

Ten years, a peso collapse and an earthquake later, we met to revise his Selected Poems for New Directions, and JEP suggested I meet more Mexican poets.

I picked up Asemblea de poetas jovenes Mexicanos (An assembly of young Mexican poets) by José Emilio’s friend, Gabriel Zaid. I liked Zaid’s poetry and wanted to translate it.

I called from the Hotel Roosevelt near Reinosa, on Insurgentes….Gabriel Zaid would meet with us at the Hotel Reforma, close to Gabriel’s company, Ibcon, which compiles lists of industrial supplies and suppliers. I was magnetized to the idea of an anthologer-bibliographer of poems and spare parts of machinery. 

In the Hotel Reforma lobby, splashes and little bird notes of water percolated through greetings and introductions. A man in a brown, double-breasted business suit, whose voice was hard to separate from the fluting of the water, led Angela and me in past the fountain to the dining room behind it. He had large hands, or very visible hands, which rose as though to conduct his words and fell when he stopped speaking. Over and over again, like books, the palms of both hands were opened to us.

We clicked. I adored the mystery of how a man so deeply archival and analytic could be so witty, write poetry, criticism and love to trip the light fantastic so much he has written the danzón a poem. In the ‘86 earthquake, Gabriel’s dance step took him, with good engineering sense, to the reinforced elevator shaft of his office building. He survived, but the building was condemned. Ibcon moved across the avenue, then to Calle Gutenberg—apt address for an engineer whose thesis was on the book publishing industry.  On Gutenberg, he has remodelled a 19^th-century house with interconnecting archways and domed light into his own mini replica of the mosque, whose colonnaded domes are still housed, like droning alveoli, within the cathedral at Cordoba. This two, or three, in oneness is not accidental: Gabriel is a Mexican Christian of Palestinian extraction.

When I sent out a questionnaire to many Mexican poets, whose books I had gathered and read, I got a letter back from Homero and Betty Aridjis, asking me, point blank, if I would translate some poems by Homero for the Latin American Book Fair in New York.

They were shopping for an English translator. Eliot Weinberger and the Aridjis had parted ways when Eliot became the exclusive translator for Octavio Paz.

They liked my translations and, when we were next in Mexico City, they invited us to their house for dinner. We got off the bus in the Lomas district—those hills behind Chapultepec Park—and went to the gate at one side of a large duplex. The housekeeper  opened it with a key and let us in to an enormous empty room.  Los señores Aridjis were busy. Then, Betty appeared on the stair, distracted from Grupo Cien work (Homero is President of Grupo Cien—one hundred artists for the environment—and Betty, everything else). In that big room, whose high-up windows that allow more room for bookshelves, we noticed the different areas of furniture, where groups could meet and chat in separate chair and settee sets. Homero was a former Mexican ambassador, but Betty introduced us to Tarzán, the senior citizen and diplomat of the house, first.  He was an aging German Shepherd, much in need of our fawning.

Betty, who is from New York, apologized again for the downstairs wait. Then, feet clattering, Homero sprinted down, shook hands, and talked to us rapidly as if something elsewhere were about to call on him and he would have to leave, but unlike José Emilio, and unintimidated by his own size, he had no fear of crushing us in a mad Mexican murder of affection and solicitation when he embraced us and reached up to slap our backs.

Then, the phone rang.  Betty picked it up and handed it to Homero.  Homero imparted information that Grupo Cien had on some subject of environmental concern, and gave the organization’s opinion.

Now, dinner was ready. Homero sat down to eat, wiping his hair from his brow. “What do you think?” he asked. He was suddenly a commission of kind inquiry. Betty badgered him about remembering to eat. We glimpsed 400 hundred years of roving impatience in the man. Son of a Greek father and Mexican mother, he quests the world and rests in Mexico.

In phone call after phone call, at dinner, over this past decade, when asked what is the answer to this or that particular problem, we have heard him say, “Poetry.” The original language of nature we have to relearn—and the Monarch butterflies, which return to his home town of Contepec and the hill of Altamirano from Ontario—he sees no difference between their lives and his poems. Crush them and the dust of his words will be left forever on the hands of the murderers.

In the early nineties, we stayed at the Hotel del Angel, just across from where I first met Octavio Paz in his penthouse apartment on the corner of Lerma and Tiber. After the earthquake, Octavio moved two blocks to the Avenida Reforma’s oldest highrise condominium. The Hotel del Angel is, literally and literarily, central to Mexico City.  When I invited Elsa Cross, Elva Macías and Verónica Volkow to the top-floor restaurant, it was just before Christmas.  Yes, most of the poets had met Octavio across the way on Lerma. We could see it from the window, but “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” didn’t permit poetic intercourse. In self-defence, I pleaded loyalty. In the seventies, we stayed with our kids at its sister hotel, the San Francisco, by the Alameda. The earthquake had flopped the San Francisco’s insides, floor by floor, like a layer cake, and many of the clerks and bellboys were moved to the del Angel. 

But, to avoid the restaurant menu of music and rooftop disco, which might make a complete flop of the del Angel, Verónica Volkow suggested we come to the launch of a friend’s book at the Franz Mayer Museum on the Alameda.

Our first course at that soirée was a balalaika trio in the courtyard. A fine quintet of literary peers accompanied the poet’s ten-minute reading with short critiques and memoirs of his literary life in this building of volcanic stone that had endured centuries of tests and assessments by earthquake. In the après-launch, Verónica introduced us to her mother and her father—who was, someone whispered to us over drinks, Trotsky’s grandson—the aristocracy of the left. Something we were lucky to learn, for until she had established her credentials as one of Mexico’s best poets, Verónica allowed no mention of it. 

In the seventies, we had visited the house in Coyoácan where she grew up. By then it was a private museum, tended by the family with no government support.  Verónica might very well have been the girl, an anonymous family member, who showed us the relics at the table where the ice pick found Trotsky bent over his studies. That house survived raids and hails of bullets that still pock the walls, brick turrets and iron door to the bedroom.

We have since moved from the turret of the del Angel to the María Cristina down Lerma. As Elva Macías put it in the garden, there: “This is much better than the other place.” And I hope Where Words Like Monarchs Fly is too, for bringing my correspondence and correspondences with all ten poets together.

George McWhirter