 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Octavio Paz (1914-1998) |
|
Mexican poet, writer, and
diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With
Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Octavio Paz was one of the several Latin
American poets whose work had wide international impact. Although
many of Paz's poems have a regular meter and rhyme scheme, he also experimented with the form. Among his most
famous poems is Piedra de sol (1957, Sunstone),
referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec
folklore, but Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems, which unite nature and love, were modelled
on the ancient Aztec calendar stone. I travel my way through galleries of sound, Octavio
Paz was born in Mexico City, the son of Octavio Paz Solórzano and
Josefina Lozano, born in Andalucía, Spain. His grandfather, Ireneo Paz,
was a
novelist and journalist – he had a library which contained twelve
thousand books –
who defended the rights of the indigenous peoples. At the time when Paz
was born, the Mexican revolution was at its height. His father, a
lawyer, was an ardent supporter of the
legendary Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919) and served as his secretary.
Looking back to this chaotic period, Paz said: "The Revolution was a
sudden immersion of Mexico in herown being, from which she brought back
up, almost blindly, the essentials of a new kind of state. (The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, translated by Lysander Kemp, Grove Press, 1961, p. 148) In 1916 Octavio Paz Solórzano went to Texas to do Zapatista propaganda without much success. When
Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in
exile in the United States for a short time. Paz
grew up on the outskirts of Mexico City. From early on, he had an
appetite for reading. Three books affected him deeply: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Saint-John Perse's Anabase (1930) and André Breton's L'Amour fou (1937). ('Paz, Octavio,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 1122) At the age of nineteen, Paz published his first collection of poems, Luna silvestre
(1933). Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but
did not take his degree. From his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write; eventually he published over 40 books. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz participated there in a congress of anti-fascist writers. He tried to volunteer the International Brigades in 1937, but as he said in an interview, "instead they thought I would be more useful in Mexico to the Republicans by publishing their cause. I returned to Mexico and collaborated with El Popular." (Mexico’s Mandarins: Crafting a Power Elite for the Twenty-First Century by Roderic Ai Camp, 2002, p. 117) His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André
Malraux, André Gide, and Ilya Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection Bajo tu clara sombra(1937).
The leftist overtones reflected the cause of the Republican side. Paz
remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and
democracy, but his political views changed over time. From the 1940s he
started to use Surrealistic images. Influenced by André Breton he experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's
expression was never uncontrolled. Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the
Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern; he called writers the "guardians of
language." "I think that
for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent
religion," Paz once said. (New York Times, 11.6.1994)
With this attitude he departed from such
leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García
Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith
in Communism – Paz accused him of being contaminated with
politics – and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz
maintained his intellectual independence and adopted an utopian vision of social harmony: "The world will order
itself according to the values of poetry, liberty and communion, or it
will fall". ('Mentalist Poetics, the Quest, 'Fiesta' and Other Motifs' by Jason Wilson, in Octavio Paz, edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 2002, p. 54) Paz
often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and
his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart
because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what
I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent /
Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and
what I forget: / Poetry". (from 'Between what I see and what I say . . . ,' in A Tree Within by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger, 1988, p. 5) In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He
founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo, which introduced such diverse writers as Eliot, Lautréamont, and John Donne into Spanish. In 1941 he co-edited Laurel,
an influential anthology of Spanis-language poetry. At the beginning of
the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies
at the University of Berkley. After WW II Paz joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six happy years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later said. (In Light in India by Octavio Paz, translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger, p. 1995, p. 3) He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. While in India, he met and married Marie-José Tramini, saying that it was the most important thing that had happened to him after being born. By 1957, when The Sun Stone appeared, Paz had been publishing
poetry for twenty-six years. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post
in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico
City in October, before the Olympic Games. Probably over 300 died. Paz
became a strong critic of the hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario
Institutional (PRI). Before moving back to
Mexico, where he started to explore his childhood and youth in his
poetry, Paz spent his time mostly at British and American universities. Pasado en claro
(1975) and Vuelta (1976) drew from autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne'
Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to
those who wanted to "set the world right." Politically he had already
turned to support liberal democracy and free-market economics. From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta, which published works by numerous writers and intellectuals from different parts of Latin America. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, came out in 1988. Octavio Paz died on April 19, 1998, at the age of 84. Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism,
existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American
modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a
conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua.
Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as
Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and
Roberto Matta. In Salamandra
(1962) Paz used innovations
of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and
reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image
is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme a copulations of sounds;
poetry eroticizes language and the world, because its operation is
erotic to begin with," Paz argued. (The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane, Harcourt Brace & Company, p. 3) As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. El laberinto de la soledad (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked. When you talk with them, you observe that their sensibilities are like a pendulum, but a pendulum that has lost its reason and swings violently and erratically back and forth." (Ibid., p. 13) According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. Paz expressed his scorn for Western feeling of cultural superiority in Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-garde
(1974), in which he said: "Every time the Europeans and their
North American descendants have encountered other cultures and
civilizations, the have called them backward.
. . . The Western world has identified itself with change and time, ad
there is no modernity other than of the West. There are hardly any
barbarians, Infidels or Gentiles left; rather, the new Heathen Dogs can
be counted in the millions, but they are called "underdeveloped
peoples.""
(Ibid., translated by Rachel Phillips, Harvard University Press, 1974, p. 20) Although Paz was
known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he
criticized the weaknesses of liberal democracy in Tiempo nublado (1983), La otra voz (1990) and Itinerario (1993),
in which he lamenred that modern society was plagued by "cult of money,
abysmal inequalities, fierce selfishness, uniformity of tastes,
opinions, consciences." ('Paz, Pri, and Progress:
Octavio Paz's Political, Economic and Literary Struggle to Inspire
Reform in Twentieth-Century Mexico' by D. Gene Pace, Essays in Economic & Business History, Volume XXI, 2003, p. 64) Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include El arco y la lira (The Bow and the Lyre 1956), Los hijos del limo (Children of the Mire 1974), and Marcel Duchamp (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993)
Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive
blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino
Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's
self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he
says yes," Paz once stated. (The New York Times, 30.5.1993) For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, edited by Ángel Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by Carlos H. Magis (1978); Octavio Paz, edited by Alfredo Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by Jason Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, edited by Kosrof Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Understanding Octavio Paz by Jose Quiroga (1999); Heterogeneity of Being: on Octavio Paz's Poetics of Similitude by Marco Luis Dorfsman (2016); Postcolonial Reconstruction: A Sociological Reading of Octavio Paz by Oliver Kozlarek (2016); Octavio Paz: Ontology and Surrealism by Roberto Sanchez Benitez (2020); Reality in Movement: Octavio Paz as Essayist and Public Intellectual by Maarten van Delden (2021); Mexican Literature as World Literature, edited by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado (2022); Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz by Marjorie Becker (2022) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last number appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title. Suom.: Suomennettu teos Suuri lasi (Apariencia desnuda, 1991), esseekokoelma Ruhtinas ja narri (1988), runosuomennoksia kokoelmissa Näin ihminen vastaa (1964), Kello 0 (1969), Tuhat laulujen vuotta (1973), Kotka vai aurinko (1991), runot viimeksi maittuun valinneet ja suomentaneet Jyrki Kiiskinen ja Jukka Koskelainen. Selected works:
|
