Octavio Paz (1914–1998)

This a a very short book, and really quite a riot. Even after reading, what, 29 translations of this short poem... how is the light hitting, where is that moss? Weinberger's comments are short, pointed, and often funny. But he brings it a lot of substantial observations too. The Daoist slant, opposites playing together, the western light as Amitabha's.

The whole thing reminds me of Borges. It's even more fantastical because it is real!

By far the best-known work by the Mexican Nobelist, a collection of essays that sets out to discover and explain Mexican identity. Paz starts out fairly tamely by exploring the inferiority complex Mexicans develop when living among their Northern neighbours, and the pachuco counterculture that was a reaction to that, then he moves on to the macho culture with its insistence on suppressing emotions ("the mask"), the key role of the fiesta as an outlet, and the significance of the Mexican show more national swearword, the universal verb chingar.

But the real substance of the collection seems to be in the set of essays where he takes us succinctly through the cultural history of Mexico from Cortés and Malinche to his own generation, via the major signposts of independence in the 1820s, reform in 1857, and the revolution of 1910. He talks about the collision and fusion of Aztec and Catholic ideas, the flowering of Mexican culture in the late-baroque period (with the emergence of remarkable figures like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), the way every liberal reform movement before the revolution ended up concentrating power and land in the hands of a new elite, but left peasants no better off than before, and the mid-20th century situation of Mexico as a postcolonial developing country struggling to get away from the standard problems of debt, foreign ownership and an economy based on agriculture and minerals that leaves it constantly vulnerable to market fluctuations.

Clear, concise exposition, in which Paz ties Mexican culture into what was going on in the rest of the world, whilst insisting on its special situation as one of the very few postcolonial countries where a complex and highly-organised pre-colonial administration collapsed suddenly and left the colonisers to take over and superimpose their own culture. show less

En este volúmen, Paz esboza con minuciosa detalle las conexiones entre las estructuras que hacemos los sujetos para ocultar nuestra carencia del otro, y las estructuras sociales en que nos hallamos, que exigen respuestas nuestras, y en que anhelamos (sin fé) dissolvernos en la "communión." Me sorprendió muchísimo su atención a la economía y a la geopolítica mundiales de su época -- no conozco a otro pensador de su tiempo que tuvo una mirada tan lúcida de las maneras en que los show more verdaderamente importantes conflictos del medio del Siglo XX eran las de las "periferias," y de la lucha en búsqueda de la dignidad individo y de un lugar mas-o-menos participante en la sociedad mundial.

No sé muy bien a donde zarpar desde las costas a las que Paz me guío; sus últimas conclusiones parecen señalar al regreso a una vida de forma vieja, "cerrada," quizá normal y consistente, como única respuesta a las exigencias del momento histórico en que estamos, y además sugieren que la igualdad internacional sea un paso imperdible de este camino de vuelta. ¿Pero no es eso una admisión que la misma ideologia de "desarrollo" y del tiempo "progresivo" que Paz (como tantos otros) critica nos muestra igual la única manera de avanzar? ¿No prescribe para México un acercarse al mundo "adelantado" que buscara una comunión imposible? ¿Cómo se vive, como individuo o como nación, una vida solitaria pero asegurada? show less

This was my first time reading Octavio Paz, and some pages into the poems I knew it wouldn't be my last. If I have any say about it, at least. I began reading these poems as a return to a tradition I put to myself, marking the end of a year and opening a new one reading poetry.

So, 65 years worth of poetry selected and collected in this edition. The first poem was published when the writer was seventeen; the last poem when he was eighty two, just two years before his death, and I think this show more collection is an adequate representation of his work.

From the earlier of poems, throughout his writing, and to the later poems, Paz was fixated on the same subjects: nature, time, life, spirituality (meaning the curious and exploratory seeking and openness to possibilities, rather than the narrow and rigid set-in-stone dogmas), language, sensuality, and people. I've decided to include a few poems that I think encapsulate the feeling and essence of the poetry, as I believe his words speak more for and of his work than anyone else's can.

Among his earlier poems, this one named “Garden”:

Clouds adrift, sleepwalking continents,
nations with no substance, no weight,
geographies drawn by the sun
and erased by the wind.

Four walls of adobe. Bougainvillea:
my eyes bathe in its peaceful flames.
The wind moves through leaves of
exaltation
and bended knees of grass.

The heliotrope with purple steps
crosses over, enveloped in its aroma.
There is a prophet: the ash tree,
and a contemplative: the pine.
The garden is small, the sky immense.

Lush survivor amid my rubble:
in my eyes you see yourself, touch yourself,
know yourself in me and in me think of
yourself,
in me you last and in me you vanish.

On sensuality, this poem named “Two Bodies”:
Two Bodies face to face
are at times two waves
and night is the ocean.

Two bodies face to face
are at times two stones
and night the desert.
Two bodies face to face
are at times roots
in the night entangled.

Two bodies face to face
are at times knives
and the night lightning.

Two bodies face to face
are two stars that fall
in an empty sky.

Together with this poem “Wind, Water, Stone” expressing, even in translation, the euphony in Paz’s poetry:

Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,
stone’s a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:
they go by and vanish
in their empty names:
water, stone, wind.

Of life, from “Response and Reconciliation”, Paz’s last published poem:

Ah life! Does no one answer?
His words rolled, bolts of lightning
etched
in years that were boulders and now are mist.

Life never answers.
It has no ears and doesn’t hear us;
it doesn’t speak, it has no tongue.
It neither goes nor stays:
we are the ones who speak,
the ones who go,
while we hear from echo to echo, year to
year,
our words rolling through a tunnel with
no end.

That which we call life
hears itself within us, speaks with our
tongues,
and through us, knows itself.
As we portray it, we become its mirror,
we invent it.
An invention of an invention: it creates
us
without knowing what it has created,
we are an accident that thinks.
It is a creature of reflections
we create by thinking,
and it hurls itself into fictitious abysses.
The depths, the transparencies
where it floats or sinks: not life, but its
idea.
It is always on the other side and is
always other,
has a thousand bodies and none,
never moves and never stops,
it is born to die, and is born at death.

Finally, of reconciliation with death and existence, the universe and the unknown, from the third part of the same poem:
And while I say what I say
time and space fall dizzyingly,
restlessly. They fall in themselves.
Man and the galaxy return to silence.
Does it matter? Yes—but it doesn’t
matter:
we know that silence is music and that
we are a chord in this concert.

I'll stop here as there are too many poems I'd like to share, some too long, like the wondrous “The City” (which Paz dedicated to the translator of this collection, Eliot Weinberger) which refuses to be splintered and shared in bits, but which I highly recommend reading as a whole.

Wistfulness suffuse these poems, the self dissolves as Paz opens himself to himself and all else around him. It is a remarkable achievement, this work; the words, in their music and longing, imprint themselves on the reader long after reading. Octavio Paz in an interview stated, “The poem is a response to an ancient question and a reconciliation with our earthly fate.” And if there are poems that prove this statement right, Paz’s are surely placed at the very top. show less