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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.
Further Reading
A great poet often attracts prominent poets as translators, and much of Paz's work is available in excellent English versions. Muriel Rukeyser was among his first translators, and her version of "Sun Stone" is itself a major poem. All of his poetry from 1957 to 1987 has been translated by Eliot Weinberger, and individual poems have been translated by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, and William Carlos Williams, among others. The two major collections in English are Early Poems: 1935-1955 (1973) and The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987 (1987), edited by Eliot Weinberger. The essential prose works include The Labyrinth of Solitude, translated by Lysander Kemp (1961), and The Bow and the Lyre, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms (1973). Paz generated a formidable amount of commentary in English as well as Spanish. See especially The Perpetual Present: The Poetry and Prose of Octavio Paz, edited by Ivar Ivask (1973) and Toward Octavio Paz: A Reading of His Major Poems, 1957-1976 by John M. Fein (1986).
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Octavio Paz |
Bibliography
See I. Ivask, ed., The Perpetual Present (1974).
| Quotes By: Octavio Paz |
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."
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Octavio Paz
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| Octavio Paz | |
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| Born | Octavio Paz Lozano March 31, 1914 Mexico City, Mexico |
| Died | April 19, 1998 (aged 84) Mexico City, Mexico |
| Occupation | Writer, poet, diplomat |
| Nationality | Mexican |
| Writing period | 1931-1965 |
| Literary movement | Surrealism, Existentialism |
| Notable award(s) | Nobel Prize in Literature 1990 |
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Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Paz was born to Octavio Paz Solórzano and Josefina Lozano. His father was an active supporter of the Revolution against the Diaz 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.[citation needed] As a teenager in 1931, under the influence of D. H. Lawrence, Paz published his first poems, like Caballera. Two years later, at the age of 19, Octavio Paz 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 1937, Paz abandoned his law studies and left for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida for sons of peasants and workers.[2] 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.[3]
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'affairs, 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.
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 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 repression of students who were fighting to achieve true democracy in the country, a movement that ended abruptly when the army opened fire against demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco. 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 Norton Chair. His book Los hijos del limo ("Children of the Mire") was the result of those courses. 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 1988. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize."[4] In India he met the Hungryalist poets and was of immense help to them during their 35 month long trial.[citation needed]
Octavio Paz 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.
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 and Mark Strand. His early poetry was influenced by Marxism, surrealism, 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 Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. Several of his poems have also been adapted into choral music by composer Eric Whitacre, including "Water Night", "Cloudburst", and "A Boy and a Girl."
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.
Paz wrote the play La hija de Rappaccini in 1956. The plot centers around a young Italian student who wonders 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 gardens' beauty. Paz adapted the play from a 1844 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne that was also 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 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, bisexual 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.
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 fifties, influenced by David Rousset, André Breton and Albert Camus, he started publishing his critical views on totalitarianism in general, and against 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 of the IX volume of his completed 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. And yet, Paz always considered himself a man of the left; the democratic, 'liberal' left, not the dogmatic and illiberal one.
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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.
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