Poet, translator, and teacher George McWhirter was Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate, and holds a startlingly impressive list of awards and honours since then, most recently as translator from Spanish of the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner, Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence by Mexican novelist, activist, and journalist Homero Aridjis. In conversation with author and translator Carmen Rodríguez, he speaks to what the jury cited as “the book’s enchanting variety of tones and subjects… 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.” McWhirter offers a unique perspective on not only the singular collection but the enigmatic process of translating poetry.
Presented in partnership with Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre.
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GEORGE MCWHIRTER shared the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize with Chinua Achebe in 1972 for Catalan Poems (Oberon Press). His own poetry is anthologized in The Penguin Book Of Canadian Verse And Irish Writing In The Twentieth Century (Cork University Press). He has translated and published prose by Marco Denevi, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Arregui, and the following books from the Spanish: Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence by Homero Aridjis (New Directions), which won The Griffin International Poetry Prize 2024; The Selected Poems Of José Emilio Pachecho (New Directions), which won the F.R. Scott Prize for Translation; Eyes To See Otherwise: The Selected Poems Of Homero Aridjis (Carcanet and New Directions), Solar Poems by Homero Aridjis (City Lights) and A Time Of Angels (Fondo de Cultura Económica and City Lights, 2012). His version of Hecuba by Euripides was produced by Blackbird Theatre at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in 2009, one of his projects as Vancouver’s Inaugural Poet Laureate from 2007 – 2009.
CARMEN RODRÍGUEZ is a bilingual (Spanish and English), Chilean-Canadian writer and educator. She is the author of Guerra Prolongada/Protracted War, a volume of poetry; De cuerpo entero/and a body to remember with, a collection of short stories; and the novels Retribution and Atacama. Rodríguez lives in Vancouver.
