Octavio Paz

Later life

In New Delhi, as Ambassador of Mexico to India, Paz 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. That fall, he went to Cornell University and taught two courses, one in Spanish and the other in English—the magazine LIFE en Español published a piece, illustrated with several pictures, about his tenure there in their July 4, 1966 issue. He subsequently returned to Mexico.

In 1968, Paz resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the Mexican government's massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco; after seeking refuge in Paris, he again returned to Mexico in 1969, where he founded his magazine Plural (1970–1976) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers. From 1969 to 1970, Paz 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. In 1974, he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University; his book Los hijos del limo (Children of the Mire) was the result of his 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.

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. 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 the estrangement.

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

Paz died of cancer on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City. His ashes, along with those of his spouse, Marie-José Tramini, are kept at a memorial in the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City.

Guillermo Sheridan, who in 1998 was named by Paz as director of the Octavio Paz Foundation, published a book, Poeta con paisaje (2004), with several biographical essays about the poet.

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."

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, 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, the essay greatly influenced other Mexican writers, such as Carlos Fuentes. Ilan Stavans wrote that Paz was "the quintessential surveyor, a Renaissance man".

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 espies 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. The Mexican composer Daniel Catán adapted the play as 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, 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. 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, seventeenth-century nun, feminist poet, mathematician, and thinker.

Paz's works include the poetry collections ¿Águila o sol? (1951), La Estación Violenta, (1956), Piedra de Sol (1957). In English, Early Poems: 1935–1955 (tr. 1974) and Collected Poems, 1957–1987 (1987) have been edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, Paz's principal translator into American English.

Political thought

Originally, Paz supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, but after learning of the murder of one of his friends by the Stalinist secret police, 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 elicited 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 twentieth century.

Politically, Paz was a social democrat, who became increasingly supportive of liberal ideas without ever renouncing 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."

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

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 said that the literature on Spanish and Portuguese colonialism is biased and "is full of somber details and harsh judgments". He said that there were also immense gains:

"Not all was horror: over the ruins of the pre-Columbian world the Spanish and Portuguese raised a grandiose historical construction, much of which is still in place. They united many peoples who spoke different languages, worshiped different gods, fought among themselves, or were ignorant of one another. These peoples became united by laws and judicial institutions, but, above all, by language, culture, and religion. Although the losses were enormous, the gains were immense. To measure fairly the effect of the Spanish in Mexico, one must emphasize that without them—that is, without the Catholic religion and the culture the Spanish implanted in our country—we would not be what we are. We would probably be a collection of peoples divided by different beliefs, languages, and cultures."

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 re-establish the "sovereignty of the nation" and to bring "Chiapas peace and Mexicans tranquility".

First literary experiences

Paz was dazzled by The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, in Enrique Munguia's translation as El Páramo which was published in the magazine Contemporaries in 1930. As a result of this, although he maintained his primary interest in poetry, Paz also had an unavoidable outlook on prose: "Literally, this dual 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 sixteen, he wrote what would be his first published article, "Ethics of the Artist", in which he posed the question of 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. Employing language that resembles a religious style and, paradoxically, a Marxist one, Paz finds the true value of art in its purpose and meaning, for which the followers of pure art—of whom he is not one—are found in an isolated position and favor the Kantian idea of the "man that loses all relation with the world".

The magazine Barandal appeared in August 1931, put together by Rafael López Malo, Salvador Toscano, Arnulfo Martínez Lavalle and Paz; all of them were not yet in their youth, except for Salvador Toscano, who was a renowned writer thanks to his parents. Rafael López participated in the magazine "Modern" and, along with Miguel D. Martínez Rendón, in the movimiento de los agoristas, although it was more commented on and known by high-school students, over all for his poem, "The Golden Beast". Octavio Paz Solórzano became known in his circle as the occasional author of literary narratives that appeared in the Sunday newspaper add-in El Universal, as well as Ireneo Paz which was the name that gave a street in Mixcoac identity.

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 Prize in Literature 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
• Prix Alexis de Tocqueville, 1989
• Xavier Villaurrutia Award