José Emilio Pacheco
(1939 -2014)
José Emilio Pacheco (June 30, 1939 – January 26, 2014) was a Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the second half of the 20th century. The Berlin International Literature Festival has praised him as "one of the most significant contemporary Latin American poets". In 2009 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize for his literary oeuvre.
He began to write for magazines and newspapers while he was still at school and continued throughout university. His father, a lawyer and notary, advised his shy son to study Law so that he would one day be in a position to take over his legal practice, Registration No. 50, and would not have to live on the breadline as a writer. However, Pacheco soon switched to Philology to avoid the disturbing prospect of getting on the wrong side of the social fence and becoming a legal dogsbody in the "fight against the poor". When he was a 19-year-old student he commenced his untiring work as a critic, editor, columnist and publisher of Mexican cultural and literary journals, including 'Estaciones', 'Diálogos', 'Plural' and 'Vuelta', as well as cultural and literary supplements in the newspapers 'Proceso', '¡Siempre!', 'El Heraldo de México' and 'Excelsior'.
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| José Emilio Pacheco, Sergio Pitol y Carlos Monsiváis |
His biography is straightforward, but it plays a secondary role for the author and his readership, as "a mixture of chance and fate" (Roberto Juarroz) in the racing, raging march of time. Pacheco’s linear curriculum vitae masks creative outbursts into the semi-restricted medium of poetry. Intense reading intensifies intense living – or vice versa. Pacheco reveals certain similarities with the Argentinian poet Roberto Juarroz (1925-1995), particularly in the precision of his poetic language and his poetological passion, his independence from any group or movement and his disdain for the literature industry. Pacheco’s literary obsessions consistently branch off in four directions: poetry – essays – translation – prose. The first genre is his mainstay.
The comments of the Mexican poet Efraín Huerta (1914-1982) on Pacheco’s first volume of poetry, 'Los elementos de la noche' (Engl: The Elements of the Night), published in Mexico in January 1963, are still valid today, ten poetry collections later: "José Emilio Pacheco’s poems demonstrate formal perfection and an inner, emotional involvement. This poetry contains a yearning, an ardour, a search for colour and secrets, a quest for the right word, for the right tone. (Who is capable of finding his true voice?)"
He taught at UNAM, as well as the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Essex, anda many others in the United States, Canada y the United Kingdom.
Pacheco is a well-known translator of Samuel Beckett, Albert Einstein, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, among others.
He died aged 74 in 2014 after suffering a cardiac arrest.
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Awards
He was awarded the following prizes: Premio Cervantes (2009), Reine Sofía Award (2009), Federico García Lorca Award (2005), Octavio Paz Award (2003), Pablo Neruda Award (2004), Ramón López Velarde Award (2003), Alfonso Reyes International Prize (2004), José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature (2000), Nacional José Asunción Silva Poetry Award (1996), and Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings festival in Struga, Macedonia. He was elected by unanimous acclaim to the Mexican Academy (Academia Mexicana de la Lengua) on March 28, 2006. He was a member of The National College (El Colegio Nacional) since 1986.
“For José Emilio Pacheco time is the agent of universal destruction, and history—the passage of ruins... Pacheco exalts the triumph of nature over culture, but in exalting it, doesn't he transfigure it, changing it into the word, or—as he puts it—into 'fleeting music, the counterpoint of wind and water'?”
Octavio Paz
On José Emilio Pacheco´s Selelect Poems of José Emilio Pacheco
José Emilio Pacheco, Honored Writer Who Wrote of Social Ills, Dies at 74
By Dougloas Martin
Jan. 27, 2014
Jan. 27, 2014
José Emilio Pacheco, a Mexican poet and author who achieved renown throughout the Spanish-speaking world with highly literate poems, essays and novels that used an array of styles to explore profound questions, died on Sunday in Mexico City. He was 74.
The cause was cardiorespiratory arrest, the National Council for Culture and the Arts, in Mexico, said. His wife, Cristina, told a radio audience on Monday that he had been hospitalized on Saturday after falling and hitting his head.
Mr. Pacheco was a literary lion who won numerous awards in Latin America. In 2009, Spain’s culture ministry awarded him the Miguel de Cervantes Literature Prize, the highest award given to a Spanish-language writer.
He emerged in the 1960s as one of a group of socially concerned poets and authors who addressed burning issues like pollution, poverty and governmental bureaucracy. His early poetry resonated with surrealist and symbolic imagery, but he soon turned to the simpler, more direct style that typified his more than a dozen books of poems.
The Times Literary Supplement, in London, suggested that Mr. Pacheco’s precision, restraint and balance made “the sense of evil and disaster in the poems the more striking.”
Writing about nature’s cruelty, Mr. Pacheco said of migrating fish, “Out of a thousand, 10 will reach the sea.” And humans, in his view, were the most violent creatures. “Fish don’t torture,” he wrote. “Their banks don’t ever charge interest.”
The meaning and meaninglessness of time were frequent concerns. Merlin H. Forster, who edited “Tradition and Renewal: Essays on Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature and Culture” (1975), wrote in an essay for that book, “Pacheco is painfully aware of cyclic time and transistory human experience.”
The opening line of Mr. Pacheco’s 1981 novella, “Battles in the Desert,” is, “I remember, I don’t remember.” Carlos, the novella’s narrator, later says, “I am going to keep my memory of this moment intact because everything that now exists will never be the same again.”
In “City of Memory,” published in Spanish in 1989 and in English in 1997, he wrote, “Tomorrow/ there will be no more roses/ but our gaze/ will hold their fire.”
José Emilio Pacheco was born in Mexico City on June 30, 1939, and attributed his love of letters to his grandparents. His grandmother told him Mexican legends, and his grandfather taught him to read.
He attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he studied law and literature and worked for literary publications but did not earn a degree. He made a point of not using his editorial positions to advance his work, instead publishing it elsewhere.
His collections of short stories, essays and poems were translated into German, French, English, Japanese and Russian. He translated works by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, Harold Pinter, T. S. Eliot and Albert Einstein into Spanish. He taught at universities in Canada, England and the United States, including the University of Maryland, where for many years he taught during the fall semester. He helped edit literary journals throughout his life.
Mr. Pacheco’s survivors include his wife, a well-known cultural television journalist, and his daughters, Laura and Cecilia.
In later collections, Mr. Pacheco included poems that focused on animals as a device to criticize human behavior. Another technique he favored was to include fragments from other texts in his poems, even other poets’ work, a device he called approximation. One example was his Spanish translation of the American poet Ezra Pound’s translation of a Japanese version of an ancient Chinese poem.
Ultimately, he said that only poetry mattered, not poets, and claimed to be “leery of the literary circus.” He shrugged off the many accolades he received.
Referring to his friend Juan Gelman, the vaunted Argentine poet who lived in Mexico City and who died this month, Mr. Pacheco said, “I’m not the best poet in Mexico, not even of my neighborhood.”
Battles in the Desert and Other Stories
STORIES, FICTION
José Emilio Pacheco
translated by Katherine Silver
For those readers of Latin American literature who are tired of being fed a particularly monochrome image of Mexico––replete with virgins rising into the heavens sheathed in white gowns, with idealized peasants, tortillas in hand, staring off at the volcano in deep contemplation of The Revolution That Cannot Fail––José Emilio Pacheco will come as a welcome relief. One of Mexico's leading poets, he has also successfully ventured into the area of the short story and the novel. Battles in the Desert & Other Stories, a collection of short fiction that deals mainly with themes of childhood and innocence betrayed, is the first book of Pacheco's fiction to appear in English. Here there are no narrative arabesques, no flights of magical-realist fancy. Instead, Pacheco confronts the reader with the uglier sides of urban Mexico––its grime, its beggars, its suffocating pollution, the constricted lives of its lower middle class––all with a simplicity and directness of style impeccably shaped and clearly distilled. Pacheco himself has said that he believes that his work could never really appeal to anyone outside of Mexico City. Yet none of us lives very far from the city he so implacably portrays. His sinking, stinking metropolis becomes a metaphor for something much larger and threatening, and we respond with natural feeling to his quiet-spoken outrage. Battles in the Desert & Other Stories, a companion volume to the author's bilingual Selected Poems, includes work written over a period of two decades. The stories were translated by Katherine Silver, who has also translated Pacheco's poetry.
José Emilio Pacheco's Selected Poems is the first major retrospective gathering to appear in an English-Spanish bilingual format of the work of one of Mexico's foremost writers. Born in 1939, his talent was recognized early, and while still in his twenties he was already keeping company with the great Spanish-speaking poets of Latin America. A prolific poet and a perfectionist, Pacheco has since 1962 published seven volumes of poetry, including the National Poetry Prize-winning No me preguntes como pasa el tiempo (Don’t Ask Me How the Time Goes By) in 1969. Tarde o temprano, collected poems of 1958 to 1980, contains the revisions on which the translations in the present volume are based. The Selected Poems is edited by George McWhirter of The University of British Columbia, who worked closely with Pacheco himself in choosing the poems and their English translations. Besides McWhirter's own versions are those by Thomas Hoeksema, Alastair Reid, and Linda Scheer, as well as Edward Dorn and Gordon Brotherston, Katherine Silver, and Elizabeth Umlas. Affirming the poet's stature, McWhirter writes: "In his singularity of vision and multiplicity of poetic forms, traditional and modern, José Emillo Pacheco spans past and present in both Latin American and peninsular Spanish poetry. It is a glittering and giant technical achievement, as brilliant and instantly visible as Hart Crane's The Bridge."
Los elementos de la noche
El reposo del fuego
La arena errante
Siglo pasado (Desenlace)
No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo (Don't Ask Me How the Time Goes by: Poems, 1964-1968)
El silencio de la luna
Tarde o temprano (Collected works)
La fábula del tiempo (Anthology)
José Emilio Pacheco: Selected Poems, Edited by George McWhirter (New Directions, 1987)
City of Memory and Other Poems, trans. David Lauer, Cynthia Steele (Collected Works)
Irás y no volverás
Islas a la deriva
Desde entonces
Miro la tierra
Gota de lluvia y otros poemas para niños y jóvenes (Anthology)
Álbum de zoología (Anthology)
NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES
El viento distante y otros relatos (1963)
Morirás lejos (1967)
El principio del placer (1972)
La sangre de Medusa (1977)
Las batallas en el desierto (1981)
FURTHER READING
English:
Modern Spanish American poets. Second series / María Antonia Salgado, 2004
José Emilio Pacheco and the poets of the shadows / Ronald J Friis, 2001
Out of the volcano: portraits of contemporary Mexican artists / Margaret Sayers Peden, 1991
Tradition and renewal: essays on twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture / Merlin H Forster, 1975
The turning tides: the poetry of José Emilio Pacheco / Mary Kathryn Docter, 1991
Jose Emilio Pacheco: Selected Poems / Ed. George McWhirter, New Directions,1987
Time in the poetry of José Emilio Pacheco: images, themes, poetics / Judith Roman Topletz, 1983
Spanish:
José Emilio Pacheco : perspectivas críticas / Hugo J Verani, 2006
Ensoñación cósmica : poética de El reposo de fuego de José Emilio Pacheco / Betina Bahía Diwan, 2004
Dilemas de la poesía de fin de siglo : José Emilio Pacheco y Jaime Saenz / Elizabeth Pérez, 2001
José Emilio Pacheco : poeta y cuentista posmoderno / José de Jesús Ramos, 1992
El papel del lector en la novela mexicana contemporánea: José Emilio Pacheco/ Magda Graniela-Rodríguez, 1991
José Emilio Pacheco : poética y poesía del prosaísmo / Daniel Torres, 1990
La hoguera y el viento : José Emilio Pacheco ante la crítica / Hugo J Verani, 1987
José Emilio Pacheco / Luis Antonio de Villena, 1986
Ficción e historia : la narrativa de José Emilio Pacheco / Yvette Jiménez de Báez, 1979
