Octavio Paz
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Octavio Paz Lozano (
Spanish pronunciation: [okˈtaβjo pas loˈsano] 
audio (help·info); March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican
poet-diplomat and writer. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981
Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982
Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1990
Nobel Prize in Literature.
Early life
Paz was born to Octavio Paz Solórzano and Josefina Lozano. His father was an active supporter of the
Revolution against the
Díaz regime. Paz was raised in the village of Mixcoac (now a part of
Mexico City) by his mother Josefina (daughter of Spanish immigrants), his aunt Amalia Paz, and his paternal grandfather
Ireneo Paz, a
liberal intellectual, novelist, publisher and former supporter of President
Porfirio Díaz. He studied at
Colegio Williams. When he was five years old he spent a year in Los Angeles with his family.
Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the
influence of his grandfather's library, filled with classic Mexican and
European literature.
[1] During the 1920s, he discovered the European poets
Gerardo Diego,
Juan Ramón Jiménez, and
Antonio Machado, Spanish writers who had a great influence on his early writings.
[2] As a teenager in 1931, under the influence of
D. H. Lawrence, Paz published his first poems, including "Cabellera". Two years later, at the age of 19, he published
Luna Silvestre ("Wild Moon"), a collection of poems. In 1932, with some friends, he founded his first literary review,
Barandal. By 1939, Paz considered himself first and foremost a poet.
[c
itation needed]
In 1937, Paz abandoned his law studies and left for
Yucatán to work at a school in
Mérida for sons of peasants and workers.
[3]
There, he began working on the first of his long, ambitious poems,
"Entre la piedra y la flor" ("Between the Stone and the Flower") (1941,
revised in 1976), influenced by
T. S. Eliot, which describes the situation of the Mexican peasant under the greedy landlords of the day.
[4]
In 1937, Paz was invited to the Second International Writers Congress in Defense of Culture in Spain during the country's
civil war, showing his solidarity with the Republican side and against
fascism.
Upon his return to Mexico, Paz co-founded a literary journal,
Taller ("Workshop") in 1938, and wrote for the magazine until 1941. In 1937 he married
Elena Garro,
now considered one of Mexico's finest writers, whom he met in 1935.
They had one daughter, Helena. They were divorced in 1959.
In 1943, Paz
received a
Guggenheim fellowship and began studying at the
University of California at Berkeley
in the United States, and two years later he entered the Mexican
diplomatic service, working in New York for a while. In 1945, he was
sent to Paris, where he wrote
El Laberinto de la Soledad
("The Labyrinth of Solitude"), "an analysis of modern Mexico and the
Mexican personality in which he described his fellow countrymen as
instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude and
ceremoniousness," according to The New York Times.
[5]
In 1952, he travelled to India for the first time and, in the same year, to Tokyo, as
chargé d'affaires, and then to
Geneva, in Switzerland. He returned to Mexico City in 1954, where he wrote his great poem "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone") in 1957 and
Libertad bajo palabra (
Liberty under Oath),
a compilation of his poetry up to that time. He was sent again to Paris
in 1959, following the steps of his lover, the Italian painter Bona
Tibertelli de Pisis. In 1962 he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.
Later life
In India, Paz completed several works, including
El mono gramático (
The Monkey Grammarian) and
Ladera este (
Eastern Slope). While in India, he came into contact with a group of writers called the
Hungry Generation and had a profound influence on them.
In 1965, he married Marie-José Tramini, a French woman who would be
his wife for the rest of his life. In October 1968, he resigned from the
diplomatic corps in protest of the Mexican government's
massacre of student demonstrators in the
Plaza de las Tres Culturas in
Tlatelolco.
[6] He sought refuge in Paris for a while and returned to Mexico in 1969, where he founded his magazine
Plural (1970–1976) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers.
From 1970 to 1974, he lectured at
Harvard University, where he held the
Charles Eliot Norton professorship. His book
Los hijos del limo ("Children of the Mire") was the result of those lectures. After the Mexican government closed
Plural in 1975, Paz founded
Vuelta, a publication with a focus similar to that of
Plural, and continued to edit that magazine until his death. He won the 1977
Jerusalem Prize
for literature on the theme of individual freedom. In 1980, he was
awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard, and in 1982, he won the
Neustadt Prize. Once good friends with novelist
Carlos Fuentes, Paz became estranged from him in the 1980s in a disagreement over the
Sandinistas, whom Paz opposed and Fuentes supported.
[7] In 1988, Paz's magazine
Vuelta carried an attack by
Enrique Krauze on the legitimacy of Fuentes's Mexican identity, opening a feud between Fuentes and Paz that lasted until the latter's death.
[8] A collection of his poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1990. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
[9] In India he met the Hungryalist poets and was of immense help to them during their 35 month long trial.
[citation needed]
He died of cancer on April 19, 1998, at Alvaro Obregón, Distrito Federal, Mexico.
[10][11][12]
Guillermo Sheridan, who was named by Paz as director of the Octavio Paz Foundation in 1998, published a book,
Poeta con paisaje (2004) with several biographical essays about the poet's life up to 1968.
Aesthetics
"The poetry of Octavio Paz," wrote the critic
Ramón Xirau, "does not hesitate between language and silence; it leads into the realm of silence where true language lives."
[13]
Writings
A prolific author and poet, Paz published scores of works during his
lifetime, many of which have been translated into other languages. His
poetry has been translated into English by
Samuel Beckett,
Charles Tomlinson,
Elizabeth Bishop,
Muriel Rukeyser and
Mark Strand. His early poetry was influenced by
Marxism,
surrealism, and
existentialism, as well as religions such as
Buddhism and
Hinduism.
His poem, "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone"), written in 1957, was praised as
a "magnificent" example of surrealist poetry in the presentation speech
of his Nobel Prize. His later poetry dealt with love and eroticism, the
nature of time, and Buddhism. He also wrote poetry about his other
passion, modern painting, dedicating poems to the work of
Balthus,
Joan Miró,
Marcel Duchamp,
Antoni Tàpies,
Robert Rauschenberg, and
Roberto Matta. As an essayist Paz wrote on topics such as
Mexican politics and
economics,
Aztec art,
anthropology, and
sexuality. His book-length essay,
The Labyrinth of Solitude (Spanish:
El laberinto de la soledad), delves into the minds of his countrymen, describing them as hidden behind masks of solitude. Due to their
history, their identity is lost between a pre-Columbian and a Spanish culture, negating either. A key work in understanding
Mexican culture, it greatly influenced other Mexican writers, such as
Carlos Fuentes. Ilan Stavans wrote that he was "the quintessential surveyor, a Dante's Virgil, a Renaissance man".
[14]
Paz wrote the play "La hija de Rappaccini" in 1956. The plot centers
around a young Italian student who wanders about Professor Rappaccini's
beautiful gardens where he spies the professor's even more beautiful
daughter, Beatrice. He is horrified when he discovers the poisonous
nature of the garden's beauty. Paz adapted the play from an 1844 short
story by
Nathaniel Hawthorne that was also entitled "
Rappaccini's Daughter". He combined Hawthorne's story with sources from the Indian poet
Vishakadatta and influences from Japanese
Noh theatre, Spanish
autos sacramentales, and the poetry of
William Butler Yeats. The play's opening performance was designed by the Mexican painter
Leonora Carrington. First performed in English in 1996 at the
Gate Theatre in London, the play was translated and directed by
Sebastian Doggart and starred
Sarah Alexander as Beatrice. In 1972, Surrealist author
André Pieyre de Mandiargues translated the play into French as
La fille de Rappaccini (Editions Mercure de France). Mexican composer Daniel Catán turned the play into an opera in 1992.
Paz's other works translated into English include several volumes of essays, some of the more prominent of which are
Alternating Current (tr. 1973),
Configurations (tr. 1971), in the
UNESCO Collection of Representative Works,
[15] The Labyrinth of Solitude (tr. 1963),
The Other Mexico (tr. 1972); and
El Arco y la Lira (1956; tr.
The Bow and the Lyre, 1973). In the United States,
Helen Lane's translation of
Alternating Current won a
National Book Award.
[16] Along with these are volumes of critical studies and biographies, including
Claude Lévi-Strauss and
Marcel Duchamp (both, tr. 1970), and
The Traps of Faith, an analytical biography of the Mexican 17th-century nun, feminist poet, mathematician, and thinker
Sor Juana de la Cruz.
His works include the poetry collections
¿Águila o sol? (1951),
La Estación Violenta, (1956),
Piedra de Sol (1957), and in English translation the most prominent include two volumes that include most of Paz in English:
Early Poems: 1935–1955 (tr. 1974), and
Collected Poems, 1957–1987 (1987). Many of these volumes have been edited and translated by
Eliot Weinberger, who is Paz's principal translator into American English.
Political thought
Originally Paz showed his solidarity with the Republicans during the
Spanish Civil War,
but after learning of the murder of one of his friends by the
Republicans themselves he became gradually disillusioned. While in Paris
in the early 1950s, influenced by
David Rousset,
André Breton and
Albert Camus, he started publishing his critical views on totalitarianism in general, and against
Joseph Stalin in particular.
In his magazines
Plural and
Vuelta, he exposed the
violations of human rights in the communist regimes, including
Castro's Cuba.
This brought him much animosity from sectors of the Latin American
left. In the prologue to Volume IX of his complete works, Paz stated
that from the time when he abandoned communist dogma, the mistrust of
many in the Mexican
intelligentsia
started to transform into an intense and open enmity. Nonetheless, Paz
always considered himself a man of the left; the democratic, "liberal"
left, not the dogmatic and illiberal one.
- There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be
realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to
break apart. They cannot.
|
| Octavio Paz[17] | |
In 1990, during the aftermath of the
fall of the Berlin wall, Paz and his
Vuelta
colleagues invited several of the world's writers and intellectuals to
Mexico City to discuss the collapse of communism, including
Czesław Miłosz,
Hugh Thomas,
Daniel Bell,
Ágnes Heller,
Cornelius Castoriadis,
Hugh Trevor-Roper,
Jean-François Revel,
Michael Ignatieff,
Mario Vargas Llosa,
Jorge Edwards and
Carlos Franqui. The encounter was called
The experience of freedom (Spanish:
La experiencia de la libertad) and broadcast on Mexican television from 27 August to 2 September.
[18]
Paz has been critical of most aspects of the Zapatista uprising.
[19]
He spoke broadly in favor of a "military solution" to the uprising of
January 1994, and hoped that the "army would soon restore order in the
region". With respect to President Zedillo's offensive in February 1995,
he signed an open letter that described the offensive as a "legitimate
government action" to reestablish the "sovereignty of the nation" and to
bring "Chiapas peace and Mexicans tranquility".
[20]
List of works
Poetry collections
- 1933: Luna silvestre
- 1936: No pasarán!
- 1937: Raíz del hombre
- 1937: Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España
- 1941: Entre la piedra y la flor
- 1942: A la orilla del mundo, compilation
- 1949: Libertad bajo palabra
- 1954: Semillas para un himno
- 1957: Piedra de Sol (Sunstone)
- 1958: La estación violenta
- 1962: Salamandra (1958–1961)
- 1965: Viento entero
- 1967: Blanco
- 1968: Discos visuales
- 1969: Ladera Este (1962–1968)
- 1969: La centena (1935–1968)
- 1971: Topoemas
- 1972: Renga: A Chain of Poems with Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson
- 1975: Pasado en claro
- 1976: Vuelta
- 1979: Hijos del aire/Airborn with Charles Tomlinson
- 1979: Poemas (1935–1975)
- 1985: Prueba del nueve
- 1987: Árbol adentro (1976–1987)
- 1989: El fuego de cada día, selection, preface and notes by Paz
Book translations
- 1952: Anthologie de la poésie mexicaine, edition and introduction by Octavio Paz
- 1958: Anthology of Mexican Poetry, edition and introduction by Octavio Paz; translated by Samuel Beckett
- 1957: Sendas de Oku, by Matsuo Basho, translated in collaboration with Eikichi Hayashiya
- 1962: Antología, by Fernando Pessoa
- 1966: Poesía en movimiento (México: 1915–1966), edition by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, Homero Aridjis and Jose Emilio Pacheco
- 1971: Configurations, translated by G. Aroul (and others)
- 1974: Versiones y diversiones
Awards
