Jared Broddle - Hour 5 Main Poet: Octavio Paz (Confirmed) Minor Poets: Edgar Allen Poe Langston Hughes Robert Frost Robert Hayden (Possiblities) Octavio Paz The Nobel Prize in Literature 1990 Biography Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata. Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982. Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture. Paz in English Poetry Lloyd Mallan, "A little Anthology of Young Mexican Poets," in New Directions 9, (1947) (first translation of Paz's poetry in English). Sun Stone, trans. Muriel Rukeyser. London & N.Y.: New Directions, 1962. Sun Stone, trans. Peter Miller. Toronto: Contact Press, 1963. Selected Poems, trans. Muriel Rukeyser. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Piedra de Sol: The Sun Stone, trans. Donald Gardner. York, England: Cosmos Publications, 1969. Aguila o sol? Eagle or Sun?, trans. Eliot Weinberger. N.Y.: October House, 1970. Configurations, various translators. N.Y.: New Directions, and London: Cape, 1971. Renga: A Chain of Poems, trans. Charles Tomlinson. N.Y.: George Braziller, 1972 (collaborative poem written with Tomlinson, Jacques Roubaud, & Edoardo Sanguineti). Early Poems: 1935-1955, various translators. N.Y.: New Directions, 1973, and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974. 3 Notations/Rotations. Cambridge, Mass.: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, 1974 (limited edition with graphic designs by Toshihiro Katayama). Blanco, trans. Eliot Weinberger. N.Y.: The Press, 1974 (limited edition with "illuminations" by Adja Yunkers). Eagle or Sun?, trans. Eliot Weinberger, N.Y.: New Directions, 1976 (new version). A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems, ed. & trans. Eliot Weinberger, N.Y.: New Directions, 1979 (additional translations by Mark Strand & Elizabeth Bishop). Selected Poems, ed. Charles Tomlinson, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1979 (various translators). Airborn/Hijos del Aire, trans. Charles Tomlinson. London: Anvil Press, 1981 (collaborative poem written with Tomlinson). The Monkey Crammarian, trans. Helen Lane. N.Y.: Seaver Books, 1981. Obsidian Butterfly, trans. Eliot Weinberger. Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1983 (limited edition, with artwork by Brian Nissen). Selected Poems, ed. Eliot Weinberger. N.Y.: New Directions, 1984 (various translators). The Four Poplars, trans. Eliot Weinberger. N.Y.: The Red Ozier Press, 1985 (limited edition with woodblock by Antonio Frasconi). Homage and Desecrations, trans. Eliot Weinberger. N.Y.: The Red Ozier Press, 1987 (limited edition with artwork by Richard Mock). Prose The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp. N.Y.: Grove Press, 1961. Marcel Duchamp, or the Castle of Purity, trans. Donald Gardner. London: Cape Goliard, and N.Y.: Grossman, 1970. Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, trans. J.S. Bernstein & Maxine Bernstein. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, trans. Lysander Kemp. N.Y.: Grove Press, 1972. Alternating Current, trans. Helen Lane. N.Y.: Viking Press, 1973. The Bow and the Lyre, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. Children of the Mire: Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, trans. Rachel Phillips. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Conjunctions and Disjunctions, trans. Helen Lane. N.Y.: Viking Press, 1974. The Siren and the Seashell, and Other Essays on Poets and Poetry, trans. Lysander Kemp & Margaret Seyers Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Rachel Phillips & Donald Gardner. N.Y.: Viking Press. 1978. The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, & Rachel Phillips Belash. N.Y.: Grove Press, 1985 (expanded edition containing other works). One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History, trans. Helen Lane. N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. On Poets and Others, trans. Michael Schmidt. N.Y.: Seaver Books, 1986. Convergences: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Helen Lane. N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Anthologies, critical studies, interviews An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, ed. Octavio Paz, trans. Samuel Beckett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. New Poetry of Mexico, selected by Paz, Ali Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco & Hormero Aridjis, bilingual edition edited by Mark Strand. N.Y.: E.P. Dutton, 1970 (various translators). Rachel Phillips, The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices, trans. Frances Partridge. N.Y.: Alfred Knopf, 1973 (contains most extensive interview with Paz available in English). The Perpetual Present: The Poetry and Prose of Octavio Paz, ed. Ivar Ivask, Norman. University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Jason Wilson, Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. Kosrof Chantikian. San Francisco: Kosmos Editions, 1980 (contains a complete translation by Harry Haskell of the Play, Rappaccini's Daughter). John M. Fein, Torward Octavio Paz: A Reading of His Major Poems, 1957-1976. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html Octavio Paz Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City in 1914 to a family of Spanish and native Mexican descent. He was educated at the National University of Mexico in law and literature. Under the encouragement of Pablo Neruda, Paz began his poetic career in his teens by founding an avant-garde literary magazine, Barandal, and publishing his first book of poems, Luna silvestre (1933). In his youth, Paz spent time in the United States and Spain, where he was influenced by the modernist and surrealist movements. His sequence of prose poems, Aguila o sol? (Eagle or Sun?, 1951) is a visionary mapping of Mexico, its past, present, and future, and Piedra de Sol (Sun Stone, 1957) borrows its structure from the Aztec calendar. This long poem, and Paz's sociocultural analysis of Mexico, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950), established him as a major literary figure in the 1950s. In 1962, he became Mexico's ambassador to India and resigned six years later in protest when government forces massacred student demonstrators in Mexico City. His later work shows an ever-deepening intelligence and complexity as it investigates the intersection of philosophy, religion, art, politics, and the role of the individual. "Wouldn't it be better to turn life into poetry rather than to make poetry from life," Paz asks. "And cannot poetry have as its primary objective, rather than the creation of poems, the creation of poetic moments?" His various collections of essays engage culture, linguistics, literary theory, history, and politics with a level of originality and erudition that is unrivaled; these and his poems form a breadth of work that expresses, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, "the existence of a plurality of possibilities for harmony and truth, outside the limited range of our inherited dogmas." He was awarded the Cervantes Award in 1981, the Neustadt Prize in 1982, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Paz died in 1998. A Selected Bibliography Poetry Aguila o sol? (1951) Baja tu clara sombra y otros poemas (1937) Entre la piedra y flor (1941) Luna Silvestre (1933) Pasado en claro (1975) Piedra de sol (1957) Salamandra (1962) Selected Poems (1963) The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 (1987) Vuelta (1976) Prose Corrientae alterna (1967) El laberinto de la soledad (1950) La otra voz (1990) Posdata (1970) Tiempo nublado (1984) Essays El arco y la lira (1956) Los hijos del limo (1974) http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/645 Octavio Paz Born in Mexico City in 1914; died in 1998. Essayist, poet, diplomat, and cultural historian, Octavio Paz is Mexico's foremost man of letters of the twentieth century. His most famous prose work, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961), explored the complexities of the Mexican psyche. In its unique combination of Indian and European sensibilities, Paz contended, the Mexican consciousness resists both the linguistic hegemony of the Spanish language and the cultural "otherness" of the United States. At the same time, Paz' other essays and poems have explored more universal and international issues of contemporary life, especially questions of psychic alienation and integration. Paz himself has rejected the dreamy lyricism of his earliest work, as in Luna silvestre (Sylvan Moon, 1933). Although his early poems were heavily influenced by Surrealism and by Asian philosophy, the history of Paz’ poems is a track of restless formalism, ranging from tight imagistic perceptual moments, as in A la orilla del mundo (On the Edge of the World, 1942) and La estación violenta (The Violent Season, 1958), to the broader inclusiveness of poems based on Aztec models, to even more humanly universal techniques and themes, as in Blanco (White, 1967). In politics, Paz describes himself as a "disillusioned leftist." In the 1930s he fought on the side of the Spanish Republic. As a diplomat in the 1950s, he represented Mexico in several countries, including France, where he became friends with the Surrealists, especially Breton. Paz served also as ambassador to India, although he resigned that position in protest against the Tlatelolco Massacre (in which students were killed by government security forces, shortly before the opening of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City). Since 1976 Paz has edited the influential magazine Vuelta. The common thread that unites these various literary and social identities is Paz' enduring commitment to the complex communicability of metaphorical language. "Poetry makes things more transparent and clearer and teaches us to respect men and nature," Paz insists. A writer of interpenetrations—of solitude and solitarity, of clarity and allusiveness, of Mexican specificity and international applicability—Paz won the 1990 Nobel Prize in literature.* * From Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry. A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Stephen Tapscott, University of Texas Press, Touch My hands open the curtains of your being clothe you in a further nudity uncover the bodies of your body My hands invent another body for your body Sunstone (Fragments) crystal willow, a poplar of water, a tall fountain the wind arches over, a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still, a course of a river that turns, moves on, doubles back, and comes full circle, forever arriving: the calm course of the stars or an unhurried spring, water with eyes closed welling over with oracles all night long, a single presence in a surge of waves, wave after wave till it covers all, a reign of green that knows no decline, like the flash of wings unfolding in the sky, (...) I travel your body, like the world, your belly is a plaza full of sun, your breasts two churches where blood performs its own, parallel rites, my glances cover you like ivy, you are a city the sea assaults, a stretch of ramparts split by the light in two halves the color of peaches, a domain of salt, rocks and birds, under the rule of oblivious noon, dressed in the color of my desires, you go your way naked as my thoughts, I travel your eyes, like the sea, tigers drink their dreams in those eyes, the hummingbird burns in those flames, I travel your forehead, like the moon, like the cloud that passes through your thoughts, I travel your belly, like your dreams, your skirt of corn ripples and sings, your skirt of crystal, your skirt of water, your lips, your hair, your glances rain all through the night, and all day long you open my chest with your fingers of water, you close my eyes with your mouth of water, you rain on my bones, a tree of liquid sending roots of water into my chest, I travel your length, like a river, I travel your body, like a forest, like a mountain path that ends at a cliff I travel along the edge of your thoughts, and my shadow falls from your white forehead, my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces and go with no body, groping my way, (...) ...because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source, there is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of two in a single body, a single soul, oh total being... (...) to love is to battle, if two kiss the world changes, desires take flesh thoughts take flesh, wings sprout on the backs of the slave, the world is real and tangible, wine is wine, bread regains its savor, water is water, to love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master; the world changes if two look at each other and see (...) I follow my raving, rooms, streets, I grope my way through corridors of time, I climb and descend its stairs, I touch its walls and do not move, I go back to where I began, I search for your face, I walk through the streets of myself under an ageless sun, and by my side you walk like a tree, you walk like a river, and talk to me like the course of a river, you grow like wheat between my hands, you throb like a squirrel between my hands, you fly like a thousand birds, and your laugh is like the spray of the sea, you head is a star between my hands, the world grows green again when you smile, eating an orange, the world changes if two, dizzy and entwined, fall on the grass: the sky comes down, trees rise, space becomes nothing but light and silence, open space for the eagle of the eye, the white tribe of clouds goes by, and the body weighs anchor, the soul sets sail, and we lose our names and float adrift in the blue and green, total time where nothing happens but its own, easy crossing (...) -when was life ever truly ours? when are we ever what we are? we are ill-reputed, nothing more than vertigo and emptiness, a frown in the mirror, horror and vomit, life is never truly ours, it always belongs to the others, life is no one's, we all are life- bread of the sun for the others, the others that we all are- when I am I am another, my acts are more mine when they are the acts of others, in order to be I must be another, leave myself, search for myself in the others, the others that don't exist if I don't exist, the others that give me total existence, I am not, there is no I, we are always us, life is other, always there, further off, beyond you and beyond me, always on the horizon, life which unlives us and makes us strangers, that invents our face and wears it away, hunger for being, oh death, our bread Between Going and Staying Between going and staying the day wavers, in love with its own transparency. The circular afternoon is now a bay where the world in stillness rocks. All is visible and all elusive, all is near and can't be touched. Paper, book, pencil, glass, rest in the shade of their names. Time throbbing in my temples repeats the same unchanging syllable of blood. The light turns the indifferent wall into a ghostly theater of reflections. I find myself in the middle of an eye, watching myself in its blank stare. The moment scatters. Motionless, I stay and go: I am a pause Brotherhood Homage to Claudius Ptolemy I am a man: little do I last and the night is enormous. But I look up: the stars write. Unknowing I understand: I too am written, and at this very moment someone spells me out. http://www.susanneangst.com/poetry/paz/