Octavio Paz

(born March 31, 1914, Mexico City, Mex. — died April 19, 1998, Mexico City) Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat. Educated at the University of Mexico, Paz published his first book of poetry, Savage Moon, in 1933. He later founded and edited several important literary reviews. Influenced in turn by Marxism, Surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, his poetry uses rich imagery in dealing with metaphysical questions, and his most prominent theme is the human ability to overcome existential solitude through erotic love and artistic creativity. His prose works include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), an influential essay on Mexican history and culture. He was Mexico's ambassador to India (1962 – 68). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.

For more information on Octavio Paz, visit Britannica.com.

Search unanswered questions...

Browse: Unanswered questions | Most-recent questions | Reference library

Octavio Paz

Top

The Mexican diplomat, playwright, and essayist, Octavio Paz (born 1914) was internationally regarded as one of the principal poets of the twentieth century. His work was formally recognized in 1990 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, the first Mexican to be so honored.

"Poetry," wrote Octavio Paz in El arco y la lira (The Bow and the Lyre), "is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation." According to Paz, poetry is a form of transcendence, removing the self from history and offering in its place a vision of pure or essential being and time. Poetry is sacred, providing salvation in a secular world.

Paz was born March 31, 1914, to a distinguished Mexican family. His father, a lawyer from a mixed Spanish and Indian background, participated in the Mexican Revolution and was politically prominent. The family lost much of its wealth, however. While Paz was growing up they could not maintain the grand house near Mexico City in which they lived. The elegant furnishings, Paz once said, had to be moved to different parts of the house as various rooms became uninhabitable. For a while he occupied a room with one of its walls gone and only screens to keep out the weather. The surrealist character of his early work may owe something to that curious world he knew as a boy.

Although reared as a Roman Catholic, he broke from the Church when he was still young. His poetry may perhaps be understood in part as an effort to find a substitute for it. He published his first book in 1933 when he was 19. Four years later he went to Spain and participated in the civil war there. In Paris and then back in Mexico he met various members of the surrealist movement. Returning to Europe once again, he met André Breton, and his association with surrealism deepened. Paz was soon recognized as a major surrealist poet. ¿Aguila o sol? (1950) collects some of his strongest work from that period.

Surrealism may have appealed to Paz partly because of its effort to locate a reality greater than that immediate to the senses. Oriental philosophy promised a similar release from the material world. Paz not only became a profound student of Eastern culture, but lived for a while in Japan. Between 1962 and 1968 he served as the Mexican ambassador to India. He resigned in 1968 as a protest against the massacre of student demonstrators by the Mexican government.

The Eastern vision of a non-dualistic, non-Cartesian universe is central to Paz's work. For the Hindu, as he told Rita Guibert in an interview, the real is outside time and history. So is it in his poetry, too. Eastern philosophy, like surrealism, probably did not so much influence Paz as provide correspondences or parallels to central ambitions in his poetry. It is Mexico which seems to be the great abiding fact in his work. In a sense, Paz's poetry begins with the recognition that isolation and solitude are inevitable for everyone, and that they are especially characteristic of Mexican life. The individual is divided not only from the world but also from his or her true self. "We are condemned to live alone," he wrote in El larerinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude). "Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves."

Solitude can be transcended both in the creation of poems and in the re-creation which occurs whenever they are understood. The function of the poem then is essentially ritualistic. It exorcises the anxieties and fears that rise from the inevitable alienation of modern life and, through rhythmic configuration and image, initiates the reader into an awareness beyond time. In part the poem derives its power from eros as in the world of medieval troubadours for whom transfiguration was possible through love and sexuality.

In addition to his poetry, Paz was a major critic of his country's social and political life. In a succession of books beginning with El larerinto de la soledad, he saw the Mexican dilemma as arising in part from the fact that its culture has roots in both Spanish colonial and native Indian traditions. One tradition buttresses the other in maintaining a hierarchical and in some ways conservative society, vastly different from the world to the north. The United States seems either to have no origins or to have origins that are fundamentally European, but Mexican culture derives from Spain and the Counter-Reformation on the one hand and distinctly non-European cultures and values on the other. The United States and Mexico share the same continent, but their cultures and values are hugely different.

Paz was very interested in the world to his north. He lived at various times in the United States and taught at Harvard and the University of Texas. His only play is an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," and his poems include meditations on John Cage and Joseph Cornell, those masters of silence and stillness. Perhaps the American poet who most shares his epic and transcendent poetics is Walt Whitman.

Paz also published books on Marcel Duchamp and Claude Lévi-Strauss. He wrote on politics, religion, anthropology, archaeology, and poetics. He edited various anthologies and translated from Japanese, Portuguese, English, French, Swedish, and other languages. He also worked on joint projects with various artists and edited a series of literary magazines. He taught at various universities, including Cambridge.

Paz distinguished himself as a diplomat, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and essayist, but it was as a poet that he was internationally known. His poetic theories are widely respected, and his poetry is considered among the best any poet of his generation has yet published. This was confirmed by the Swedish Academy of Letters, which awarded Paz the 1990 Nobel Prize in literature, citing his work's "sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity." The Academy also quoted one of his love poems:

 Woman fountain in the night. I am bound to her quiet flowing

Since winning the Nobel Prize, Paz has continued to write. In 1994 he produced The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, an exploration of the current state of love in Western cultures. Two other prose pieces from 1994 include Essays on Mexican Art and My Life with the Wave.

Octavio Paz

Top

Paz, Octavio (oktä'vyō päs'), 1914-98, Mexican poet and critic. A diplomat, he lived abroad many years. Paz's books-revealing depth of insight, elegance, and erudition-place him among his generation's ablest writers. His works include the poetry collections La estación violenta (1956), Piedra de sol (1957), Alternating Current (tr. 1973), Configurations (tr. 1971), Early Poems: 1935-1955 (tr. 1974), and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987); the volumes of essays 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); criticism; and studies of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Duchamp (both, tr. 1970). In 1971-72 Paz delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard; they are collected in Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde (1974). In 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bibliography

See I. Ivask, ed., The Perpetual Present (1974).

Quotes By:

Octavio Paz

Top

Quotes:

"The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature."

"Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past."

"Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history."

"Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once."

"What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism."

"If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time."

See more famous quotes by Octavio Paz

Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Octavio Paz

Top

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2010)

Octavio Paz

Born	Octavio Paz Lozano March 31, 1914(1914-03-31) Mexico City, Mexico
Died	April 19, 1998(1998-04-19) (aged 84) Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Writer, poet, diplomat
Nationality	Mexican
Period	1931–1965
Literary movement	Surrealism, Existentialism
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1990
Influences Gerardo Diego, Rabindranath Tagore, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Eugenio Montale, Sor Juana de la Cruz, D. H. Lawrence, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Butler Yeats, Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Machado
Influenced Giannina Braschi, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Michael Palmer, Guillermo Sheridan, Ilan Stavans, Charles Tomlinson, Eliot Weinberger, Eric Whitacre, Monique Fong Wust

Octavio Paz Lozano (Spanish pronunciation: [okˈtaβjo pas loˈsano]; March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Contents

1 Early life and writings
2 Later life
3 Writings
4 Political thought
5 Further reading
6 Awards
7 References
8 External links

Early life and writings

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. Because of his family's public support of Emiliano Zapata, they were forced into exile after Zapata's assassination. They served their exile in the United States.

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.^{[citation needed]}

In 1935, 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 1938 he also met and married Elena Garro, now considered one of Mexico's finest writers. 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"), a groundbreaking study of Mexican identity and thought. 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 1963, he broke up with Bona and 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.^[5] 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. A collection of his poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1990. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.^[6] 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 in 1998.

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.

Writings

A prolific author and poet, Paz published scores of works during his lifetime, many of which are translated into other languages. His poetry, for example, 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 like 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".^[7]

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 a 1844 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne that was also entitled "Rappaccini's Daughter".

Octavio Paz

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), 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 Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Duchamp (both, tr. 1970), and The Traps of Faith, an analytical biography of the Mexican 16th-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 which 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 comrades 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^[8]

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 Vuelta encounter was broadcast on Mexican television from 27 August to 2 September.^{[citation needed]}

Octavio Paz has been critical of most aspects of the Zapatista uprising.^[9] 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" ^[10]

Awards

Nobel Prize for Literature
Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
Cervantes Prize
National Literature Prize (Mexico)
Premio Mondello (Palermo, Italy)
Alfonso Reyes Prize
Neustadt International Prize for Literature
Jerusalem Prize
Menendez y Pelayo Prize
Alexis de Tocqueville Prize
Xavier Villaurrutia Award
Doctor Honoris Causa (Harvard)
Doctor Honoris Causa (National Autonomous University of Mexico)

References

^ Guillermo Sheridan: Poeta con paisaje: ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz. México: ERA, 2004. p. 27. ISBN 968.411.575.X
^ Jaime Perales Contreras: "Octavio Paz y el circulo de la revista Vuelta". Ann Arbor, Michigan: Proquest, 2007. p.46-47. UMI Number 3256542
^ Guillermo Sheridan: Poeta con paisaje: ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz. México: ERA, 2004. p. 163. ISBN 968.411.575.X
^ Wilson, Jason (1986). Octavio Paz. Boston: G. K. Hall.
^ Preface to The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957–1987 by Eliot Weignberger'
^ Literature 1990
^ Stavans (2003, p. 3). Octavio Paz: A Meditation, University of Arizona Press.
^ Paz, Octavio. "Signs in Rotation" (1967), The Bow and the Lyre, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), p. 249.
^ Huffschmid (2004) pp127-151
^ Huffschmid (2004) p145

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Octavio Paz

Nobel museum biography and list of works
Boletin Octavio Paz
"Octavio Paz" The Art of Poetry No. 42 Summer 1991 The Paris Review
Nobel lecture
Recorded in Washington D.C. on October 18, 1988. Video (1 Hr)
Pegasos biography
"Clash of literary titans" at The Free Library. Article on Paz and Neruda by Jaime Perales Contreras from Americas Magazine July 2008
"Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz: Two Visions of Modernity" essay by Oliver Kozlarek, published in Culture, Theory & Critique, 2006, 47(1), 39–52

v d e Nobel Laureates in Literature (1976–2000)

Saul Bellow (1976) Vicente Aleixandre (1977) Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) Odysseas Elytis (1979) Czesław Miłosz (1980) Elias Canetti (1981) Gabriel García Márquez (1982) William Golding (1983) Jaroslav Seifert (1984) Claude Simon (1985) Wole Soyinka (1986) Joseph Brodsky (1987) Naguib Mahfouz (1988) Camilo José Cela (1989) Octavio Paz (1990) Nadine Gordimer (1991) Derek Walcott (1992) Toni Morrison (1993) Kenzaburō Ōe (1994) Seamus Heaney (1995) Wisława Szymborska (1996) Dario Fo (1997) José Saramago (1998) Günter Grass (1999) Gao Xingjian (2000)

Complete list (1901–1925) (1926–1950) (1951–1975) (1976–2000) (2001–2025)

Authority control: PND: 118739743 | LCCN: n79076107 | VIAF: 41844743 | SELIBR: 208533 | WorldCat

Persondata
Name	Paz, Octavio
Alternative names	Paz Lozano, Octavio (Spanish)
Short description	Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literatue
Date of birth	March 31, 1914
Place of birth	Mexico City, Mexico
Date of death	April 19, 1998
Place of death	Mexico City, Mexico

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Donate to Wikimedia

		Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more
		Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia on Answers.com. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Octavio Paz. Read more

	Rufino Tamayo: The Sources of His Art (1972 Visual Arts Film)
	La Azotea (photography)
	Beso Azteca (Latin Band, '90s, 2000s)

	What is Octavio Paz\'s birthday? Read answer...
	When did Octavio Paz dye? Read answer...
	How old was Octavio Paz at death? Read answer...

	How was Octavio Paz inspired?
	What is octavio paz inspired?
	Who didn\'t like Octavio Paz?

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

Early life and writings

Later life

Writings

Political thought

Further reading

Awards

References

External links