We are proud to present the stunning epic poem Omeros by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, in the extraordinary version by Mexican poet José Luis Rivas.

Among the various avatars that the legendary aura of Homer and his work have known throughout the history of English literature, perhaps the two most astonishing are Joyce's Ulysses and Walcott's Omeros. As in the Iliad ("Omeros" is Homer's name "in the ancient language of the islands," invoked by a Greek girl, Antigone, exiled in America), the story begins with a rivalry for the love of a woman. She is not a princess but a black Antillean servant, and those who fight for her are not kings but fishermen, but Helen's face is one of those in which the gods "consecrate all the beauty of a race." She loves Achilles but leaves him for Hector, and one day when the town is preparing for a party, the spurned lover sets sail from Saint Lucia, and in an initiatory dream and a journey through centuries is returned to the land of his ancestors, on the west coast of Africa. And while Achilles goes after his roots, another key character in the work, Dennis Plunkett, the white man, the colonizer, the eternal outsider in a town he loves, also fulfills his personal odyssey: after succumbing to the charm of Helen (the island was once named after the girl), he becomes, out of love for her, an expert on the history of the place, as well as its battles.

The narrator – Walcott himself, Homer’s sorcerer’s apprentice – was born there but lives in Boston, has travelled the world and returns to visit his widowed mother, and he too is swept along by the currents and countercurrents that unite and separate the poem’s characters, and he too is fascinated by Helena.

«Omeros reads as easily as a good novel (easier, I would say, than Henry James), but because of the colour and vigour of the images and the musical resonance of the language it seems something much greater, a grand concerto grosso with wonderful ritornelli, dazzling as mere prose could ever be» (Frank Wilson).

«Walcott is neither a traditionalist nor an avant-garde. None of the “isms” at hand serve to define him. He can be naturalist, expressionist, imagist, surrealist, hermetic, confessional – you name it. It is simply that he has absorbed all the styles that the North had to offer: he now stands on his own two feet, and in great form. He is the best poet in the English language" (Joseph Brodsky).

"Walcott, like Octavio Paz, makes the Nobel Prize worthy of the prizewinners. Omeros is his masterpiece, for which he was considered one of the greatest poets of the English language" (Guillermo Cabrera Infante).

"No poet can compete with Walcott in humor, in depth, in sumptuous verbal invention, or in ability to express the thoughts of his characters and force the reader to follow the rapid mutations of ideas and images in their minds. The fascinating story of Omeros unfolds in a spiral, imitating human thought and in the end, and in a surprising way, makes us realize that the story - all the story - is ours" (The New York Times Book Review).