On March 25th, 2022, celebrated translator and UBC emeritus George McWhirter will be leading an online translation workshop for graduate students of French and Hispanic Studies titled “The Possibles and Impossibles in Translation.” McWhirter has worked with Mexican poets such as José Emilio Pacheco, a former faculty member of UBC’s Spanish program.
In this article, graduate students Rodolfo Ortiz, Anthony Pearce and Nancy Ross explain the significant literary relationship between George McWhirter and José Emilio Pacheco, and why this translation workshop is of particular significance to the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies (FHIS).
George McWhirter
The Literary Relationship Between George McWhirter and José Emilio Pacheco
The literary relationship between George McWhirter and José Emilio Pacheco is extensive and fundamentally very productive. Of all Pacheco’s translators, McWhirter was perhaps the translator who knew the poetic work of Pacheco most deeply. Pacheco also translated McWhirter’s poems, thus showing the importance of a very productive literary friendship.
McWhirter met Pacheco when Pacheco was a Visiting Professor in the Spanish program at UBC. McWhirter was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1939, the same year Pacheco was born in Mexico. He studied Creative Writing at UBC and he became a professor in the department. He was the Director of Creative Writing at UBC from 1983-1993. In 2007, he became Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate. He has published many of his own collections of poetry and translated the works of Mexican writers such as Gabriel Zaid, Homero Ardijis and, of course, José Emilio Pacheco.
Pacheco (1939-2014) was a Mexican poet, essayist, novelist, short story writer, and translator. He studied at the National Autonomous University. He worked for many years as a magazine editor before teaching literature in the USA, England, and Canada. He translated the works of Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, and C.P. Cavafy. He wrote poetry in many styles and has written many poems about Mexico City. One of his most famous narrative works is Las batallas en el desierto [Battles in the Desert], 1981.
“Seizing a poetic experience in another language is not only an idiomatic transplant, but builds bridges towards a possible, although ideal, collective work.”
Along with his work as a poet and essayist, we are particularly interested in the bridge that Pacheco establishes between the original poem as the motivation for a new poem, that is, a way of putting translation into practice as a process. In this regard, Pacheco speaks of “approaches” as a process of an enrichment of both the literary and cultural aspects of the original poem. Seizing a poetic experience in another language is not only an idiomatic transplant, but builds bridges towards a possible, although ideal, collective work. “Poetry does not belong to anyone, it is made by everyone,” said Lautreamont.
Translation Workshop
In his upcoming translation workshop on March 25th titled “The Possibles and Impossibles in Translation”, McWhirter will elaborate on Pacheco’s theories on translation and his own close collaboration with Pacheco’s work— including one of his translations of Pacheco’s poetry, Selected Poems (New Directions Press, 1987), which won the F.R. Scott Translation Prize. He will look at individual poems and talk about the choices that he made, and the theory behind those choices.
George McWhirter donated an important fund to the University of British Columbia Archives. In this archive, the reader can find very valuable genetic materials of poems in translation, letters, among other materials, that may inspire important future studies:
