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Octavio Paz was born nearMexico City. His family was a prominentliberal political family in Mexico, withSpanish andindigenous Mexican roots.[1] His grandfather,Ireneo Paz, the family's patriarch, fought in theWar of the Reform against conservatives, and then became a staunch supporter of liberal war heroPorfirio Díaz up until just before the 1910 outbreak of theMexican Revolution. Ireneo Paz became an intellectual and journalist, starting several newspapers, where he was publisher and printer. Ireneo's son, Octavio Paz Solórzano, supportedEmiliano Zapata during the Revolution, and published an early biography of him and the Zapatista movement. Octavio was named for him, but spent considerable time with his grandfather Ireneo, since his namesake father was active fighting in the Mexican Revolution; his father died in a violent fashion.[2][3] The family experienced financial ruin after the Mexican Revolution; they briefly relocated to Los Angeles, before returning to Mexico.[3] Paz had blue eyes and was often mistaken for a foreigner by other children—according to a biography written by his long-time associate, historianEnrique Krauze, when Zapatista revolutionaryAntonio Díaz Soto y Gama met young Octavio, he said, "Caramba, you didn't tell me you had aVisigoth for a son!" Krauze quotes Paz as saying, "I felt myself Mexican but they wouldn't let me be one."[4]
Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather Ireneo's library, filled with classicMexican andEuropean literature.[5] During the 1920s, he discoveredGerardo Diego,Juan Ramón Jiménez, andAntonio Machado; these Spanish writers had a great influence on his early writings.[6]
As a teenager in 1931, Paz published his first poems, including "Cabellera". Two years later, at the age of nineteen, he publishedLuna Silvestre (Wild Moon), a collection of poems. Between those publications, in 1932 at the age of 18, he founded his first literary review,Barandal with some friends.
For a few years, Paz studied law and literature atNational University of Mexico.[1] During this time, he became familiar withleftist poets, such as ChileanPablo Neruda.[3] In 1936, Paz abandoned his law studies, and left Mexico City forYucatán to work at a school inMérida. The school was set up for the sons ofpeasants and workers.[7][8] 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 1976); influenced by the work ofT. S. Eliot, it explores the situation of the Mexican peasant under the domineering landlords of the day.[9]
In July 1937 he attended the Second International Writers' Congress—the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals tothe war in Spain—held inValencia,Barcelona andMadrid and attended by many writers, includingAndré Malraux,Ernest Hemingway,Stephen Spender, andPablo Neruda.[10] Paz showed his solidarity with the Republican side, and against thefascists led byFrancisco Franco. While in Europe he also visited Paris, where he encountered thesurrealist movement, which left a profound impact upon him.[11] After his return to Mexico, in 1938 Paz co-funded a literary journal,Taller [es] ("Workshop") and wrote for that magazine until 1941. In 1937 he marriedElena Garro, considered to be one of Mexico's finest writers; they had met in 1935. They had one daughter, Helena, and were divorced in 1959.
In 1943, Paz received aGuggenheim Fellowship and used it to study at theUniversity of California at Berkeley in the United States. Two 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, where he wroteEl Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude);The New York Times later described it 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."[12] In 1952, he travelled to India for the first time, and that same year went toTōkyō aschargé d'affaires. He next was assigned toGeneva, Switzerland. He returned to Mexico City in 1954, where he wrote his great poem "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone") in 1957, and publishedLibertad bajo palabra (Liberty under Oath), a compilation of his poetry up to that time. He was again sent to Paris in 1959, and in 1962, he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.
InNew Delhi, as Ambassador of Mexico toIndia, Paz completed several works, includingEl mono gramático (The Monkey Grammarian) andLadera este (Eastern Slope). While in India, he met numerous writers of a group known as theHungry Generation and had a profound influence on them.
In 1965, he marriedMarie-José Tramini, a French woman who would be his wife for the rest of his life. That fall, he went toCornell University and taught two courses, one in Spanish and the other in English—the magazineLIFE 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'smassacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco;[13] after seeking refuge in Paris, he again returned to Mexico in 1969, where he founded his magazinePlural (1970–1976) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers.From 1969 to 1970, Paz wasSimón Bolívar Professor at theUniversity of Cambridge. He was also a visiting lecturer during the late 1960s, and theA. D. White Professor-at-Large from 1972 to 1974 at Cornell. In 1974, he was theCharles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry atHarvard University; his bookLos hijos del limo (Children of the Mire) was the result of his lectures. After the Mexican government closedPlural in 1975, Paz foundedVuelta, another cultural magazine. He was editor of that until his death in 1998, when the magazine closed.
Paz won the 1977Jerusalem Prize for literature on the theme of individual freedom. In 1980, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard, and in 1982, he won theNeustadt Prize. Once good friends with novelistCarlos Fuentes, Paz became estranged from him in the 1980s in a disagreement over theSandinistas, whom Paz opposed and Fuentes supported.;[14] in 1988, Paz's magazineVuelta published criticism of Fuentes byEnrique Krauze, resulting in the estrangement.[15]
A collection of Paz's poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1990, and in that year, he was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature.[16]
Paz died of cancer on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City.[17][18][19] His ashes, along with those of his spouse, Marie-José Tramini, are kept at a memorial in theColegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City.[20][21]
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.[citation needed]
"The poetry of Octavio Paz," wrote the criticRamón Xirau, "does not hesitate between language and silence; it leads into the realm of silence where true language lives."[22]
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 bySamuel Beckett,Charles Tomlinson,Elizabeth Bishop,Muriel Rukeyser andMark Strand. His early poetry was influenced byMarxism,surrealism, andexistentialism, as well as religions such asBuddhism andHinduism. 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 ofBalthus,Joan Miró,Marcel Duchamp,Antoni Tàpies,Robert Rauschenberg, andRoberto Matta. As an essayist, Paz wrote on topics such asMexican politics andeconomics,Aztec art,anthropology, andsexuality. 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 theirhistory, their identity is lost between a pre-Columbian and a Spanish culture, negating either. A key work in understandingMexican culture, the essay greatly influenced other Mexican writers, such asCarlos Fuentes. Ilan Stavans wrote that Paz was "the quintessential surveyor, aDante's Virgil, a Renaissance man".[23]
Octavio Paz
Paz wrote the playLa 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 writerNathaniel Hawthorne, which was also entitled "Rappaccini's Daughter"; he combined Hawthorne's story with sources from the Indian poetVishakadatta and influences from JapaneseNoh theatre, Spanishautos sacramentales, and the poetry ofWilliam Butler Yeats. The play's opening performance was designed by the Mexican painterLeonora Carrington. In 1972, Surrealist authorAndré Pieyre de Mandiargues translated the play into French asLa fille de Rappaccini (Editions Mercure de France). First performed in English in 1996 at theGate Theatre in London, the play was translated and directed bySebastian Doggart and starredSarah 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 areAlternating Current (tr. 1973),Configurations (tr. 1971), in theUNESCO Collection of Representative Works,[24]The Other Mexico (tr. 1972); andEl Arco y la Lira (1956; tr.The Bow and the Lyre, 1973). In the United States,Helen Lane's translation ofAlternating Current won aNational Book Award.[25]Along with these are volumes of critical studies and biographies, including ofClaude Lévi-Strauss andMarcel Duchamp (both, tr. 1970), andThe Traps of Faith, an analytical biography ofSor 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) andCollected Poems, 1957–1987 (1987) have been edited and translated byEliot Weinberger, Paz's principal translator into American English.
II International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture.
Originally, Paz supported the Republicans during theSpanish 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 byDavid Rousset,André Breton andAlbert Camus, he started publishing his critical views on totalitarianism in general, and particularly againstJoseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union.
In his magazinesPlural andVuelta, Paz exposed theviolations of human rights in Communist regimes, includingCastro'sCuba. 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 Mexicanintelligentsia 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 asocial 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."[26]
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.
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:[29]
"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 theZapatista uprising in 1994.[30] 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".[31]
Paz was dazzled byThe Waste Land byT. S. Eliot, in Enrique Munguia's translation asEl Páramo which was published in the magazineContemporaries 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 betweenmorals andpoetry, 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, aMarxist one, Paz finds the true value of art in its purpose and meaning, for which the followers of pure art—of whom he isnot one—are found in an isolated position and favor theKantian idea of the "man that loses all relation with the world".[32]
The magazineBarandal appeared in August 1931, put together byRafael 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 withMiguel D. Martínez Rendón, in themovimiento 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-inEl Universal, as well asIreneo Paz which was the name that gave a street inMixcoac identity.
^abOctavio Paz on Nobelprize.org, accessed 29 April 2020
^México, Distrito Federal, Registro Civil (20 Apr 1998)."Civil Death Registration".FamilySearch.org. Genealogical Society of Utah. 2002. Retrieved22 December 2013.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Xirau, Ramón (2004)Entre La Poesia y El Conocimiento: Antologia de Ensayos Criticos Sobre Poetas y Poesia Iberoamericanos. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica p. 219.
^Stavans (2003).Octavio Paz: A Meditation. University of Arizona Press. p. 3.
^Configurations, Historical Collection: UNESCO Culture Sector,UNESCO official website
^Yvon Grenier,From Art to Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom (Rowman and Littlefield, 1991); Spanish trans.Del arte a la política, Octavio Paz y la busquedad de la libertad (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994).
^Paz, Octavio."Signs in Rotation" (1967),The Bow and the Lyre, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), p. 249.
