ABSTRACT
101I had intended to write at greater length about Mexican poet Homero Aridjis’ strange, beautiful memoir The Child Poet ([1971]2016). However, the introduction to the book, written by Aridjis’ daughter, who has translated The Child Poet from Spanish into English, is itself a piece of literature so fine that I cannot seem to get beyond it to comment on the father’s work. The English introduction to El poeta niño is so essential to what the father was trying to say when he first wrote down his recollections of his early life that it has brought to completion an autobiography that would be unfinished without it. Chloe Aridjis has not only translated and introduced her father’s memories of his boyhood; she has supplied what was missing from them, almost as if she had defied time and biology and played a part in the life he led before she was born.
