Journal of Dreams is the latest anthology of the Mexican poet and writer, Homero Aridjis (Contepec, Michoacan; 1940), one of the greatest living poets and writers in Spanish. The work, to be published by Fondo de cultura Económico de México, resulted from dreams he had several years ago and which, when he wrote them down, became poems. Ever since “El poeta niño,” published in 1971, he has sought to recover who he had been before the serious accident he had suffered in January 1950 and which nearly cost him his life. Indeed his life was spared and when he “recovered”, he says, he began to read and to write poetry.
So it was that in 1970, finding himself in New York and his first daughter, Chloe, about to be born, he began dreaming about the child he had been before the accident, as a way of reconnecting with his own self, since that part of his past had been blotted out.
Night after night he dreamed, and upon waking and as if obeying a kind of oneiric discipline, he wrote down his dreams and these, linked into a literary sequence, provided him with a forgotten portrait of himself. The habit of writing down the dreams and turning them into poetic material stayed with him and, in the latest dreams, has become more intense. So that now “I confuse poems with dreams and dreams with poems. The result is that this new anthology consists of pieces of myself merged with experiences and memories.”
In this book Homero explores the themes of unreal reality and real unreality, which, in the end turn into dreams
THE THEME OF DREAMS IN YOUR WORK IS SIGNIFICANT BECAUSE FOR A LONG TIME YOU WERE KNOWN AS A POET WHO WROTE ABOUT EROTICICISM.
My first writing was erotic. The great French writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909 – 1991) once asked me when I was going to write another erotic work like Perséfone. I told him “never,” because I am never going to be 26 years old again, an age when one sees the world differently and is becoming interested in new subjects in the light of other experiences. For example, I experience love at the age I am now which is different from when I was 18.