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'''Octavio Paz Lozano''' ({{IPA-es|okˈtaβjo pas loˈsano}} {{Audio|Octavio Paz.ogg|audio}}; March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and [[diplomacy|diplomat]]. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 [[Miguel de Cervantes Prize]], the 1982 [[Neustadt International Prize for Literature]] and the 1990 [[Nobel Prize in Literature]].
'''Octavio Paz Lozano''' ({{IPA-es|okˈtaβjo pas loˈsano}} {{Audio|Octavio Paz.ogg|audio}}; March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and [[diplomacy|diplomat]]. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 [[Miguel de Cervantes Prize]], the 1982 [[Neustadt International Prize for Literature]] and the 1990 [[Nobel Prize in Literature]].

==Later life==
In India, Paz completed several works, including ''El mono gramático'' (''The Monkey Grammarian'') and ''Ladera este'' (''Eastern Slope''). While in India, he came into contact with a group of writers called 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. In October 1968, he resigned from the diplomatic corps in protest of the Mexican government's [[Tlatelolco massacre|massacre of student demonstrators]] in the [[Plaza de las Tres Culturas]] in [[Tlatelolco (Mexico City)|Tlatelolco]].<ref>Preface to ''The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957–1987'' by Eliot Weignberger''''</ref> He sought refuge in Paris for a while and returned to Mexico in 1969, where he founded his magazine ''Plural'' (1970–1976) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers.

From 1970 to 1974, he lectured at [[Harvard University]], where he held the [[Charles Eliot Norton Lectures|Charles Eliot Norton professorship]]. 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 (magazine)|Vuelta]]'', a publication with a focus similar to that of ''Plural'', and continued to edit that magazine until his death. 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.<ref name=NYT>{{cite web |url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/books/carlos-fuentes-mexican-novelist-dies-at-83.html |title=Carlos Fuentes, Mexican Man of Letters, Dies at 83 |author=Anthony DePalma |date=May 15, 2012 |work=The New York Times |accessdate=May 16, 2012}}</ref> In 1988, Paz's magazine ''[[Vuelta (magazine)|Vuelta]]'' carried an attack by [[Enrique Krauze]] on the legitimacy of Fuentes's Mexican identity, opening a feud between Fuentes and Paz that lasted until the latter's death.<ref name=WP>{{cite web |url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/carlos-fuentes-mexican-novelist-dies-at-83/2012/05/15/gIQAx7dxRU_story.html |title=Carlos Fuentes, Mexican novelist, dies at 83 |author=Marcela Valdes |date=May 16, 2012 |work=The Washington Post |accessdate=May 16, 2012}}</ref> A collection of his poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1990. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.<ref name="Nobel Prize Literature 1990">[http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1990 Nobel Prize Literature 1990]</ref> In India he met the Hungryalist poets and was of immense help to them during their 35&nbsp;month long trial.{{Citation needed|date=April 2008}}

He died of cancer on April 19, 1998, at Alvaro Obregón, Distrito Federal, Mexico.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1951-23163-24439-71?cc=1923424&wc=M9W1-L3L:1513580468 |title=Civil Death Registration |author=México, Distrito Federal, Registro Civil |date=20 Apr 1998 |website=FamilySearch.org |publisher=Genealogical Society of Utah. 2002 |accessdate=22 December 2013}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Arana-Ward |first1=Marie |year=1998 |title=Octavio Paz, Mexico's Great Idea Man |journal=Washington Post |url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/paz.htm |accessdate=October 3, 2013}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Kandell |first1=Jonathan |year=1998 |title=Octavio Paz, Mexico's Man of Letters, Dies at 84 |journal=New York Times |url=http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/21/books/octavio-paz-mexico-s-man-of-letters-dies-at-84.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm |accessdate=October 3, 2013}}</ref>

[[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 1968.


==Aesthetics==
==Aesthetics==

Revision as of 02:06, 3 February 2014

Octavio Paz
File:Octavio Paz.gif
BornOctavio Paz Lozano
(1914-03-31)March 31, 1914
Mexico City, Mexico
DiedApril 19, 1998(1998-04-19) (aged 84)
Mexico City, Mexico
OccupationWriter, poet, diplomat
NationalityMexican
Period1931–1965
Literary movementSurrealism, Existentialism
Notable awardsMiguel de Cervantes Prize
1981
Nobel Prize in Literature
1990

Octavio Paz Lozano (Spanish pronunciation: [okˈtaβjo pas loˈsano] audioⓘ; March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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."[1]

Writings

A prolific author and poet, Paz published scores of works during his lifetime, many of which are translated into other languages. His poetry, for example, 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 like 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".[2]

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 even more beautiful daughter, Beatrice. He is horrified when he discovers the poisonous nature of the garden's beauty. Paz adapted the play from an 1844 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne that was also entitled "Rappaccini's Daughter".

Octavio Paz

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. 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. In 1972, Surrealist author André Pieyre de Mandiargues translated the play into French as La fille de Rappaccini (Editions Mercure de France). Mexican composer Daniel Catán turned the play into 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,[3] 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.[4] Along with these are volumes of critical studies and biographies, including Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Duchamp (both, tr. 1970), and The Traps of Faith, an analytical biography of the Mexican 17th-century nun, feminist poet, mathematician, and thinker Sor Juana de la Cruz.

His works include the poetry collections ¿Águila o sol? (1951), La Estación Violenta, (1956), Piedra de Sol (1957), and in English translation the most prominent include two volumes which include most of Paz in English: Early Poems: 1935–1955 (tr. 1974), and Collected Poems, 1957–1987 (1987). Many of these volumes have been edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, who is Paz's principal translator into American English.

Political thought

Originally Paz showed his solidarity with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, but after learning of the murder of one of his friends by the Republicans themselves he became gradually disillusioned. While in Paris in the early 1950s, influenced by David Rousset, André Breton and Albert Camus, he started publishing his critical views on totalitarianism in general, and against Joseph Stalin in particular.

In his magazines Plural and Vuelta, he exposed the violations of human rights in the communist regimes, including Castro's Cuba. This brought him 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 Mexican intelligentsia started to transform into an intense and open enmity. Nonetheless, Paz always considered himself a man of the left; the democratic, "liberal" left, not the dogmatic and illiberal one.

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.
Octavio Paz[5]

In 1990, during the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin wall, Paz and his Vuelta colleagues invited several of the world's writers and intellectuals to Mexico City to discuss the collapse of communism, including Czesław Miłosz, Hugh Thomas, Daniel Bell, Ágnes Heller, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jean-François Revel, Michael Ignatieff, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Edwards and Carlos Franqui. The encounter was called The experience of freedom (Spanish: La experiencia de la libertad) and broadcast on Mexican television from 27 August to 2 September.[6] Octavio Paz has been critical of most aspects of the Zapatista uprising.[7] 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 reestablish the "sovereignty of the nation" and to bring "Chiapas peace and Mexicans tranquility"[8]

List of Works

Poetry collections

  • 1933: Luna silvestre
  • 1936: No pasarán!
  • 1937: Raíz del hombre
  • 1937: Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España
  • 1941: Entre la piedra y la flor
  • 1942: A la orilla del mundo, compilation
  • 1949: Libertad bajo palabra
  • 1954: Semillas para un himno
  • 1957: Piedra de Sol (Sunstone)
  • 1958: La estación violenta
  • 1962: Salamandra (1958–1961)
  • 1965: Viento entero
  • 1967: Blanco
  • 1968: Discos visuales
  • 1969: Ladera Este (1962–1968)
  • 1969: La centena (1935–1968)
  • 1971: Topoemas
  • 1972: Renga: A Chain of Poems with Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson
  • 1975: Pasado en claro
  • 1976: Vuelta
  • 1979: Hijos del aire/Airborn with Charles Tomlinson
  • 1979: Poemas (1935–1975)
  • 1985: Prueba del nueve
  • 1987: Árbol adentro (1976–1987)
  • 1989: El fuego de cada día, selection, preface and notes by Paz

Book translations

  • 1952: Anthologie de la poésie mexicaine, edition and introduction by Octavio Paz
  • 1958: Anthology of Mexican Poetry, edition and introduction by Octavio Paz; translated by Samuel Beckett
  • 1957: Sendas de Oku, by Matsuo Basho, translated in collaboration with Eikichi Hayashiya
  • 1962: Antología, by Fernando Pessoa
  • 1966: Poesía en movimiento (México: 1915–1966), edition by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, Homero Aridjis and Jose Emilio Pacheco
  • 1971: Configurations, translated by G. Aroul (and others)
  • 1974: Versiones y diversiones

Awards

References

  1. ^ 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.
  2. ^ Stavans (2003, p. 3). Octavio Paz: A Meditation, University of Arizona Press. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  3. ^ Configurations, Historical Collection: UNESCO Culture Sector, UNESCO official website
  4. ^ "National Book Awards – 1974". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-11.
    There was a National Book Award category Translation from 1967 to 1983.
  5. ^ Paz, Octavio. "Signs in Rotation" (1967), The Bow and the Lyre, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), p. 249.
  6. ^ Christopher Domínguez Michael (November 2009). "Memorias del encuentro: "La experiencia de la libertad"". Letras Libres (in Spanish). Retrieved July 10, 2013.
  7. ^ Huffschmid (2004) pp127-151
  8. ^ Huffschmid (2004) p145
  9. ^ Member of Colegio Nacional (in spanish)
  10. ^ "Honorary Degree National Autonomous University of Mexico".
  11. ^ "Honorary Degree Harvard University".
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference Nobel Prize Literature 1990 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ Presidency of the Italian Republic. "Awards granted to Octavio Paz by the Italian Republic" (in Italian). Retrieved August 13, 2013. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |cite= (help)
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