Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz in 1988. Photo by John Leffmann. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 - April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat.

Life

Youth and education

Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather's library, filled with classic Mexican and European literature. During the 1920s, he discovered Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Antonio Machado, Spanish writers who had a great influence on his early writings.

As a teenager in 1931, Paz published his earliest poems, including "Cabellera". In 1932, together with Rafael López Malo, Salvador Toscano, and Arnulfo Martínez Lavalle, he founded a literary review, Barandal. The following year, at the age of 19, he published a debut collection of poetry, Luna Silvestre ("Wild Moon").

Career.

In 1937 at the age of 23, Paz abandoned his law studies and left Mexico City for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida, set up for the sons of peasants and workers.

In 1937 he married Elena Garro, who is considered among Mexico's finest writers. They had met in 1935. They had a daughter, Helena, but divorced in 1959.

Also in 1937, Paz was invited to the Second International Writers Congress in Defense of Culture in Spain during the country's civil war; he showed 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 1943, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship and used it to study at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States. 2 years later he entered the Mexican diplomatic service, and was assigned for a time to New York City. In 1945, he was sent to Paris. 

In 1952, he travelled to India . That same year, he went to Tokyo, as chargé d'affaires. He next was assigned to Geneva, Switzerland. He returned to Mexico City in 1954, where he wrote his great poem "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone") in 1957, and published Libertad bajo palabra (Liberty under Oath), a compilation of his poetry up to that time. He was sent again to Paris in 1959.

In 1962, Paz was named Mexico's ambassador to India. In India he completed several works, including El mono gramático (The Monkey Grammarian) and Ladera este (Eastern Slope). While in India, he met numerous writers of a group known as 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 service in protest of the Mexican government's massacre of student demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco.

After staying in Paris for refuge, he returned to Mexico in 1969. He founded his magazine Plural (1970–1976) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers.

From 1969 to 1970 he was Simón Bolívar professor at the University of Cambridge. He was also a visiting lecturer during the late 1960s, and the A.D. White professor-at-large from 1972 to 1974 at Cornell University. In 1974 he lectured at Harvard University as Charles Eliot Norton lecturer. 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, another cultural magazine. He was editor of that until his death in 1998, when the magazine closed.

Political thought

Originally Paz supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, but after learning of the murder of a friend by the Republicans, 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 particularly against Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union.

In his magazines Plural and Vuelta, Paz exposed the violations of human rights in 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. Paz continued to consider himself a man of the left, the democratic, "liberal" left, not the dogmatic and illiberal one. He also criticized the Mexican government and leading party that dominated the nation for most of the 20th century.

Politically, Paz was basically a social-democrat, who became increasingly supportive of liberal ideas without ever renouncing to his initial leftist and romantic views. In fact, Paz was "very slippery for anyone thinking in rigid ideological categories," Yvon Grenier wrote in his book on Paz's political thought. "Paz was simultaneously a romantic who spurned materialism and reason, a liberal who championed freedom and democracy, a conservative who respected tradition, and a socialist who lamented the withering of fraternity and equality. An advocate of fundamental transformation in the way we see ourselves and modern society, Paz was also a promoter of incremental change, not revolution."

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. Writers included 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.

Paz criticized the Zapatista uprising in 1994. 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".

Later life

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. In 1988, Paz's magazine Vuelta published criticism of Fuentes by Enrique Krauze, resulting in estrangement between Paz and Fuentes, who had long been friends.

A collection of Paz's poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1990. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He died of cancer on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City.

Writing

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. 

As a teacher in Merida, Paz began working on the earliest of his ambitious long poems, "Entre la piedra y la flor" ("Between the Stone and the Flower") (1941, revised in 1976). Influenced by the work of T.S. Eliot, it explores the situation of the Mexican peasant under the domineering landlords of the day.

His work El Laberinto de la Soledad ("The Labyrinth of Solitude") was later described by the New York Times as "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." 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".

File:Paz0.jpg

Octavio Paz

Paz wrote a 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 daughter Beatrice. He is horrified to discover the poisonous nature of the garden's beauty. Paz adapted the play from an 1844 short story by American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, which 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. In 1972, Surrealist author André Pieyre de Mandiargues translated the play into French as La fille de Rappaccini (Editions Mercure de France). 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.

His works include poetry collections ¿Águila o sol? (1951), La Estación Violenta, (1956), Piedra de Sol (1957), and in English translation the most prominent include 2 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. 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, 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). Along with these are volumes of critical studies and biographies, including of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Duchamp (both, tr. 1970), and The Traps of Faith, an analytical biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican 17th-century nun, feminist poet, mathematician, and thinker.

He (Octavio Paz) was quite blown away by the book, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, translated by Enrique Munguia as The Squad, and published in the magazine Contemporaries in 1930. As a result of this, although he maintained his primary interest in poetry, he had an unavoidable outlook on prose: "Literally, this duel practice was for me a game of reflections between poetry and prose".

Worried about confirming the existence of a link between morals and poetry, in 1931, at the age of 16, Paz wrote what would be his earliest published article, "Ethics of the Artist", where he planted the question about the duty of an artist among what would be deemed art of thesis, or pure art, which disqualifies the second as a result of the teaching of tradition. Assimilating a language that resembles a religious style and, paradoxically, a Marxist style, finds the true value of art in its purpose and meaning, for which, the followers of pure art, of which he was not one, are found in an isolated position and favor the kantiana idea of the "man that loses all relation with the world".

Critical reputation

"The poetry of Octavio Paz," wrote critic Ramón Xirau, "does not hesitate between language and silence; it leads into the realm of silence where true language lives."

Quotations

"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."

Recognition

Paz 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.

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.

In the United States, Helen Lane's translation of Alternating Current won a National Book Award.

Awards

• Inducted Member of Colegio Nacional, Mexican highly selective academy of arts and sciences 1967
• Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
• National Prize for Arts and Sciences (Mexico) in Literature 1977
• Honorary Doctorate National Autonomous University of Mexico 1978
• Honorary Doctorate (Harvard University) 1980
• Ollin Yoliztli Prize 1980
• Miguel de Cervantes Prize 1981
• Nobel Literature Prize in 1990
• Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic 1991
• Premio Mondello (Palermo, Italy)
• Alfonso Reyes International Prize
• Neustadt International Prize for Literature 1982
• Jerusalem Prize
• Menéndez Pelayo International Prize
• Alexis de Tocqueville Prize
• Xavier Villaurrutia Award

In popular culture

Mexican composer Daniel Catán adapted Paz's play La hija de Rappaccini as an opera in 1992.

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.

Publications

Poetry

• Luna silvestre. México: Fabula, 1933.
• No pasarán! México: Simbad, 1936.
• Raíz del hombre. México: Simbad, 1937.
• Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España. Valencia: Ediciones Españolas, 1937.
• Entre la piedra y la flor. México: Nueva Voz, 1941.
• A la orilla del mundo. México: ARS, 1942.
• Libertad bajo palabra. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1949.
• Águila o sol? (prose poetry). México:, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951.
• Semillas para un himno. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1954.
• Piedra de sol. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957.
• La estación violenta. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958.
• Salamandra, 1958-1961. México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1962.
• Viento entero. Delhi: Caxton Press, 1965.
• Blanco. México: Joaquin Mortiz, 1967.
• Discos visuales(with art by Vicente Rojo). México: Ediciones ERA, 1968.
• Ladera Este, 1962-1968. México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969.
• La centena, 1935-1968. Barcelona: Barral, 1969.
• Topoemas. México: Ediciones ERA, 1971.
• Renga (with Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguinetti, & Charles Tomlinson). México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1972.
• El mono gramático (prose poetry). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974.
• Pasado en claro. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975.
• Vuelta. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976.
• Hijos del aire / Airborn (with Charles Tomlinson). México: Martín Pescador, 1979.
• Poemas, 1935-1975. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979.
• Prueba del nueve. México: Círculo de Lectores, 1985.
• Árbol adentro, 1976-1987. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987.
• Lo mejor de Octavio Paz. El fuego de cada día. Selección (with prólogue & notes by Paz). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1989.

Plays

• “La hija de Rappaccini”. México, en la Revista Mexicana de Literatura 7, (septiembre-octubre 1956); Poemas, 1979.

Non-fiction

• El laberinto de la soledad. México: Cuadernos Americanos, 1950, 2nd edition, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959.
• El arco y la lira. México: Fondo de Cultura Econ&oacutemica, 1956.
• Las peras del olmo. México: UNAM, 1957.
• Cuadrivio. México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1965.
• Los signos en rotación. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1965.
• Puertas al campo. México: UNAM, 1966.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo. México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1967.
• Corriente alterna. México: Siglo XXI, 1967.
• Marcel Duchamp o el castillo de la pureza. México: Ediciones ERA, 1968 **also published in Apariencia desnuda: la obra de Marcel Duchamp. México: Ediciones ERA, 1973.
• Conjunciones y disyunciones. México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969.
• México: la última década. Austin, TX: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas, 1969.
• Posdata. México: Siglo XXI, 1970.
• Las cosas en su sitio: sobre la literatura española del siglo xx (with Juan Marichal). México: Finisterre, 1971.
• Los signos en rotación y otros ensayos (edited by Carlos Fuentes). Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1971.
• Traducción: literatura y literalidad. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1971.
• El signo y el garabato. México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1973.
• Solo a dos voces (with Julián Rios). Barcelona: Lumen, 1973.
• Teatro de signos / Transparencias (edited by Julián Rios). Madrid: Fundamentos, 1974.
• La búsqueda del comienzo. Madrid: Fundamentos, 1974.
• Los hijos del limo: del romanticismo a la vanguardia. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974.
• Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1978.
• El ogro filantropico: historia y politica (1971-1978). México: Joaquin Mortiz, 1979.
• In/mediaciones. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979.
• México en la obra de Octavio Paz (edited by Luis Mario Schneider). México: Promociones Editoriales Mexicanas, 1979.
  • México en la obra de Octavio Paz (edited by Luis Mario Schneider). (3 volumes), México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987. Vol. I. El peregrino en su patria. Historia y política de México. Vol. II. Generaciones y semblanzas. Escritores y letras de México. Vol. III. Los privilegios de la vista. Arte de México. .
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1982; Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1982.
• Tiempo nublado. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983.
• Sombras de obras. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983.
• Hombres en su siglo y otros ensayos. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984.
• Pasión crítica: conversaciones con Octavio Paz (edited by Hugo J. Verani). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985.
• Primeras páginas (edited by Enrico Mario Santí). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1988; México: Vuelta, 1988.
• La otra vez. Poesía y fin de siglo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990.

Translated

• Matsuo Basho, Sendas de Oku (translated with Eikichi Hayashiya). México: UNAM, 1957; Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970.
• Fernando Pessoa, Antología. México: UNAM, 1962.
• Versiones y diversiones: Traducciones de poesía. México: Joaquin Mortiz, 1974.

Edited

• Anthologie de la poésie mexicaine (edited by Paz). Paris: Éditions Nagel (Col. UNESCO), 1952.
  • Anthology of Mexican Poetry. (bilingual, with English translations by Samuel Beckett). Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1958.
• Laurel: Antología de la poesía moderna en lengua española (edited by Xavier Villaurrutia, Emilio Prados, Juan Gil-Albert & Octavio Paz). México: Editorial Séneca, 1941.
• Poesía en movimiento (México: 1915-1966) (edited by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, Homero Aridjis & Jose Emilio Pacheco). México: Siglo XXI, 1966.

Poetry in English

• Lloyd Mallan, “A little Anthology of Young Mexican Poets,” New Directions 9, (1947) (1st translation of Paz’s poetry in English).
• Sun Stone (translated by Muriel Rukeyser). London & New York: New Directions, 1962.
  • Sun Stone (translated by Peter Miller). Toronto: Contact Press, 1963.
  • Piedra de Sol = The Sun Stone (translated by Donald Gardner). York, UK: Cosmos, 1969.
• Selected Poems (translated by Muriel Rukeyser). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1963.
• Aguila o sol? = Eagle or Sun? (translated by Eliot Weinberger). New York: October House, 1970.
  • Eagle or Sun? (translated by Eliot Weinberger). New York: New Directions, 1976.
• Configurations (various translators). New York: New Directions / London: Cape, 1971.
• Renga: A Chain of Poems (collaborative poem written with Charles Tomlinson, Jacques Roubaud, & Edoardo Sanguineti; translated by Tomlinson). New York: George Braziller, 1972.
• Early Poems, 1935-1955 (various translators). New York: New Directions, 1973; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1974.
• Blanco (translated by Eliot Weinberger; with “illuminations” by Adja Yunkers). New York: The Press, 1974.
• A Draft of Shadows, and other poems (edited & translated by Eliot Weinberger; additional translations by Mark Strand & Elizabeth Bishop). New York: New Directions, 1979.
• Selected Poems (edited by Charles Tomlinson; various translators). Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1979.
• Airborn = Hijos del Aire (translated by Charles Tomlinson). London: Anvil Press, 1981 (collaborative poem written with Tomlinson).
• The Monkey Crammarian (translated by Helen Lane). New York: Seaver Books, 1981.
• Obsidian Butterfly (translated by Eliot Weinberger; with artwork by Brian Nissen). Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1983.
• Selected Poems (edited by Eliot Weinberger; various translators). New York: New Directions, 1984.
• The Four Poplars (translated by Eliot Weinberger; with woodblock by Antonio Frasconi). New York: Red Ozier Press, 1985.
• Homage and Desecrations (translated by Eliot Weinberger; with artwork by Richard Mock). New York: Red Ozier Press, 1987.

Non-fiction in English

• The Labyrinth of Solitude (translated by Lysander Kemp). New York: Grove Press, 1961.
  • The Labyrinth of Solitude ((expanded edition containing other works; translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, & Rachel Phillips Belash). New York: Grove Press, 1985 .
• Marcel Duchamp; or, The castle of purity (translated by Donald Gardner). London: Cape Goliard / New York: Grossman, 1970.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss: An introduction (translated by J.S. Bernstein & Maxine Bernstein). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970.
• The Other Mexico: Critique of the pyramid (translated by Lysander Kemp). New York: Grove Press, 1972.
• Alternating Current (translated by Helen Lane). New York: Viking Press, 1973.
• The Bow and the Lyre (translated by Ruth L.C. Simms). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1973.
• Children of the Mire: Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde (translated by Rachel Phillips). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
• Conjunctions and Disjunctions (translated by Helen Lane). New York: Viking Press, 1974.
• The Siren and the Seashell, and other essays on poets and poetry (translated by Lysander Kemp & Margaret Seyers Peden). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1976.
• Marcel Duchamp: Appearance stripped bare (translated by Rachel Phillips & Donald Gardner). New York: Viking Press. 1978.
• One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on contemporary history (translated by Helen Lane). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
• On Poets and Others (translated by Michael Schmidt). New York: Seaver Books, 1986.
• Convergences: Selected essays on art and literature (translated by Helen Lane). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

Three poems by Octavio Paz

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy The Nobel Prize.

See also

• Poets of other languages

External links

Poems

• Octavio Paz profile & poem at the Academy of American Poets
• Octavio Paz 7 poems at Poems and Pickaxes
• Octavio Paz at PoemHunter (16 poems)
• Octavio Paz at AllPoetry (19 poems)

Prose

• Nobel lecture

Audio / video

• Octavio Paz at YouTube
• Recorded in Washington D.C. on October 18, 1988. Video (1 Hr)

Books

• Octavio Paz at Amazon.com

About

• Octavio Paz in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Nobel biography and list of works
• Boletin Octavio Paz
• "Octavio Paz" The Art of Poetry No. 42 Summer 1991 The Paris Review
• Review of Octavio Paz: El poeta y la revolución, Enrique Krauze, Mexican Studies/Estudios mexicanos (2015), 31 (1): 196—200.

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