Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1977 Jerusalem Prize, the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Early life

Octavio Paz was born near Mexico City. His family was a prominent liberal political family in Mexico, with Spanish and indigenous Mexican roots. with his grandfather, Ireneo Paz, the family's patriarch, having fought in the War of the Reform against conservatives, and then became a staunch supporter of liberal war hero Porfirio Díaz up until just before the 1910 outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Ireneo Paz became an intellectual and journalist, starting several newspapers, where he was publisher and printer. Ireneo's son, Octavio Paz Solórzano, supported Emiliano 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. The family experienced financial ruin after the Mexican Revolution. The family briefly relocated to Los Angeles before returning to Mexico. Paz had blue eyes and was often mistaken for a foreigner by other children. According to a biography written by his long-time associate, historian Enrique Krauze, said that when Zapatista revolutionary Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama met young Octavio he said "''Caramba'', you didn't tell me you had a Visigoth for a son!" Krauze quotes Paz as saying "I felt myself Mexican but they wouldn't let me be one."

Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather Ireneo's library, filled with classic Mexican and European literature. During the 1920s, he discovered Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Antonio Machado. These Spanish writers had a great influence on his early writings.

As a teenager in 1931, Paz published his first poems, including "Cabellera". Two years later, at the age of 19, he published ''Luna Silvestre'' ("Wild Moon"), a collection of poems. In 1932, with some friends, he funded his first literary review, ''Barandal''.

For a few years, Paz studied law and literature at National University of Mexico. During this time, he became familiar with leftist poets, such as Chilean Pablo Neruda. In 1936, Paz abandoned his law studies and left Mexico City for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida. The school was set up for the sons of peasants and workers. 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 the work of T. S. Eliot, it explores the situation of the Mexican peasant under the domineering landlords of the day.

In July 1937 he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war in Spain, held in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid and attended by many writers including André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Spender, and Pablo Neruda. Paz showed his solidarity with the Republican side and against the fascists led by Francisco Franco and supported by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He also visited Paris while in Europe. There, he encountered the surrealist movement, which left a profound impact upon him. After his return to Mexico, Paz co-funded a literary journal, ''Taller'' ("Workshop") in 1938, and wrote for the magazine until 1941. In 1937 he married Elena Garro, who is considered 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 a Guggenheim Fellowship and used it to study at the University 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 wrote '' El 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." In 1952, he travelled to India for the first time. That same year, he went to Tokyo, as chargé d'affaires. He next was assigned to Geneva, Switzerland. He returned to Mexico City in 1954, where he wrote his great poem "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone") in 1957, and published ''Libertad bajo palabra'' (''Liberty under Oath''), a compilation of his poetry up to that time. He was sent again to Paris in 1959. In 1962, he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.

Later life

In New Delhi, as Ambassador of Mexico to India, Paz completed several works, including ''El mono gramático'' (''The Monkey Grammarian'') and ''Ladera este'' (''Eastern Slope''). While in India, he met numerous writers of a group known as the Hungry Generation and had a profound influence on them.

In 1965, he married Marie-José Tramini, a French woman who would be his wife for the rest of his life. That fall in 1965 he went to Cornell and taught two courses, one in Spanish and one in English. The magazine LIFE en Español published a piece about his stay at Cornell in their July 4, 1966 issue. There are several pictures in the article. After this he returned to Mexico. In 1968, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest of the Mexican government's massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco.
After staying in Paris for refuge, he returned to Mexico in 1969. He founded his magazine ''Plural'' (1970–1976) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers.

From 1969 to 1970 he was Simón Bolívar Professor at Cambridge University. He was also a visiting lecturer during the late 1960s and the A. D. White Professor-at-Large from 1972 to 1974 at Cornell University. In 1974 he lectured at Harvard University as Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer. His book ''Los hijos del limo'' ("Children of the Mire") was the result of those lectures. After the Mexican government closed ''Plural'' in 1975, Paz founded '' Vuelta'', another cultural magazine. He was editor of that until his death in 1998, when the magazine closed.

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. Once good friends with novelist Carlos Fuentes, Paz became estranged from him in the 1980s in a disagreement over the Sandinistas, whom Paz opposed and Fuentes supported. In 1988, Paz's magazine '' Vuelta'' published criticism of Fuentes by Enrique Krauze, resulting in estrangement between Paz and Fuentes, who had long been friends.

A collection of Paz's poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1990. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He died of cancer on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City.

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 1998, when he died.

Aesthetics

"The poetry of Octavio Paz", wrote the critic Ramón Xirau, "does not hesitate between language and silence; it leads into the realm of silence where true language lives."

Writings

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 by Samuel Beckett, Charles Tomlinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser and Mark Strand. His early poetry was influenced by Marxism, surrealism, and 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 Tàpies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. As an essayist Paz wrote on topics such as 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. Ilan Stavans wrote that he was "the quintessential surveyor, a Dante's Virgil, a Renaissance man".

Paz wrote the play ''La hija de Rappaccini'' in 1956. The plot centers around a young Italian student who wanders about Professor Rappaccini's beautiful gardens where he spies 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 writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, which was 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. In 1972, Surrealist author André Pieyre de Mandiargues translated the play into French as ''La fille de Rappaccini '' (Editions Mercure de France). 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. 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 are ''Alternating Current'' (tr. 1973), ''Configurations'' (tr. 1971), in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, '' 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). In the United States, Helen Lane's translation of ''Alternating Current'' won a National Book Award."National Book Awards – 1974"
National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-11.

There was a National Book Award category Translation from 1967 to 1983.
Along with these are volumes of critical studies and biographies, including of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Duchamp (both, tr. 1970), and ''The Traps of Faith'', an analytical biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican 17th-century nun, feminist poet, mathematician, and thinker.

His 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) and ''Collected Poems, 1957–1987'' (1987) have been edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, who is Paz's principal translator into American English.

Political thought

Originally, Paz supported the Republicans during the Spanish 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 by David Rousset, André Breton