Octavio Paz Biography and List of Works

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

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. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. 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. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with 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) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. 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); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.

LUNA SILVESTRE, (1933)