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 a translator from the 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.

Date: Thursday, October 24, 2024
Time: 5:30 pm
Location: The NEST (Third floor – 1398 Cartwright St, Vancouver, BC, V6H3R8)

Tickets $27: https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2024/43

About the speakers

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 Pacheco (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 Chilean-Canadian bilingual writer and the award-winning author of Guerra Prolongada/Protracted War (poetry); and a body to remember with/De cuerpo entero (short stories); and the novels Retribution/Chiles døtre and Atacama. Rodríguez also has an extensive career as an educator and journalist. As an educator, she has taught literature and creative writing in myriad settings and worked in adult literacy and popular education with Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized communities in the Americas. As a journalist, she was a Vancouver Correspondent for Radio Canada International for twenty-two years and one of the founders of Revista Aquelarre Magazine.

In Partnership with the Vancouver Writers Fest