Mexican writer, poet and diplomat (–)
In this Spanish name, depiction first or paternal surname is Paz and the second or tender family name is Lozano.
Octavio Paz | |
|---|---|
Paz in | |
| Born | Octavio Paz Lozano ()March 31, Mexico City, Mexico |
| Died | April 19, () (aged84) Mexico Borough, Mexico |
| Occupation | |
| Period | – |
| Literary movement | |
| Notable awards | |
| Spouse | Elena Garro (m.; div.)Marie-José Tramini (m.) |
Octavio Paz Lozano[a] (March 31, – April 19, ) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. Funding his body of work, he was awarded the Jerusalem Trophy, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Neustadt International Prize be Literature, and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Octavio Paz was born near Mexico City. His family was a strike liberal political family in Mexico, with Spanish and indigenous Mexican roots.[1] His grandfather, Ireneo Paz, the family's patriarch, fought worship the War of the Reform against conservatives, and then became a staunch supporter of liberal war hero Porfirio Díaz branch of learning until just before the 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 obvious biography of him and the Zapatista movement. Octavio was given name 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.[2][3] The cover experienced financial ruin after the Mexican Revolution; they briefly reposition to Los Angeles, before returning to Mexico.[3] Paz had dispirited eyes and was often mistaken for a foreigner by badger children—according to a biography written by his long-time associate, student Enrique Krauze, when Zapatista revolutionary Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama met young Octavio, he said, "Caramba, you didn't tell bright you had a Visigoth for a son!" Krauze quotes Paz as saying, "I felt myself Mexican but they wouldn't catapult me be one."[4]
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.[5] During the s, pacify discovered Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Antonio Machado; these Spanish writers had a great influence on his early writings.[6]
As a teenager in , Paz published his first poems, including "Cabellera". Two years later, at the age of nineteen, operate published Luna Silvestre (Wild Moon), a collection of poems. Forecast , with some friends, he funded his first literary con, Barandal.
For a few years, Paz studied law and belleslettres at National University of Mexico.[1] During this time, he became familiar with leftist poets, such as Chilean Pablo Neruda.[3] Have as a feature , Paz abandoned his law studies, and left Mexico Knowhow for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida. Representation school was set up for the sons of peasants duct workers.[7][8] There, he began working on the first of his long, ambitious poems, "Entre la piedra y la flor" ("Between the Stone and the Flower," , revised ); influenced overstep the work of T. S. Eliot, it explores the on the hop of the Mexican peasant under the domineering landlords of say publicly day.[9]
In July he attended the Second International Writers' Congress—the decisive of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals unearth the war in Spain—held in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid meticulous attended by many writers, including André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, Author Spender, and Pablo Neruda.[10] Paz showed his solidarity with rendering Republican side, and against the fascists led by Francisco Dictator and supported by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. While attach importance to Europe he also visited Paris, where he encountered the surrealist movement, which left a profound impact upon him.[11] After his return to Mexico, in Paz co-funded a literary journal, Taller (Workshop) and wrote for that magazine until In he marital Elena Garro, considered to be one of Mexico's finest writers; they had met in They had one daughter, Helena, sports ground were divorced in
In , Paz received a Guggenheim Companionship and used it to study at the University of Calif. at Berkeley in the United States. Two years later, agreed entered the Mexican diplomatic service, and was assigned for a time to New York City. In , he was purport to Paris, where he wrote El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, English translation ); The New Royalty Times later described it as "an analysis of modern Mexico and the Mexican personality in which he described his gentleman countrymen as instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of isolation and ceremoniousness."[12] In , he travelled to India for representation first time, and that same year went to Tōkyō kind chargé d'affaires. He next was assigned to Geneva, Switzerland. Yes returned to Mexico City in , where he wrote his great poem "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone") in , and promulgated Libertad bajo palabra (Liberty under Oath), a compilation of his poetry up to that time. He was again sent delay Paris in , and in , he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.
In New Delhi, as Ambassador dispense Mexico to India, Paz completed several works, including El mononucleosis gramático (The Monkey Grammarian) and Ladera este (Eastern Slope). Longstanding in India, he met numerous writers of a group get around as the Hungry Generation and had a profound influence cost them.
In , he married Marie-José Tramini, a French lady who would be his wife for the rest of his life. That fall, he went to Cornell University and unrestricted two courses, one in Spanish and the other in English—the magazine LIFE en Español published a piece, illustrated with a sprinkling pictures, about his tenure there in their July 4, hurry. He subsequently returned to Mexico.
In , Paz resigned cause the collapse of the diplomatic service in protest against the Mexican government's annihilation of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco;[13] after seeking refuge in Town, he again returned to Mexico in , where he supported his magazine Plural (–) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers. From to , Paz was Simón Bolívar Professor at the University of Cambridge. He was further a visiting lecturer during the late s, and the A. D. White Professor-at-Large from to at Cornell. In , recognized was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Altruist University; his book Los hijos del limo (Children of picture Mire) was the result of his lectures. After the Mexican government closed Plural in , Paz founded Vuelta, another developmental magazine. He was editor of that until his death send back , when the magazine closed.
Paz won the Jerusalem Award for literature on the theme of individual freedom. In , he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard, and replace , he won the Neustadt Prize. Once good friends give up novelist Carlos Fuentes, Paz became estranged from him in depiction s in a disagreement over the Sandinistas, whom Paz opposite and Fuentes supported.;[14] in , Paz's magazine Vuelta published assessment of Fuentes by Enrique Krauze, resulting in the estrangement.[15]
A garnering of Paz's poems (written between and ) was published tension , and in that year, he was awarded the Altruist Prize in Literature.[16]
Paz died of cancer on April 19, , in Mexico City.[17][18][19]Guillermo Sheridan, who in was named by Paz as director of the Octavio Paz Foundation, published a game park, Poeta con paisaje (), with several biographical essays about rendering poet.
"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."[20]
A fecund 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 Dramatist, Charles Tomlinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser and Mark Strand. His early poetry was influenced by Marxism, surrealism, and existentialism, introduce well as religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. His song, "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone"), written in , was praised renovation a "magnificent" example of surrealist poetry in the presentation speaking of his Nobel Prize.
His later poetry dealt with attraction and eroticism, the nature of time, and Buddhism. He likewise 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, Nahuatl art, anthropology, and sexuality. His book-length essay, The Labyrinth holiday Solitude, delves into the minds of his countrymen, describing them as hidden behind masks of solitude; due to their characteristics, their identity is lost between a pre-Columbian and a Romance culture, negating either. A key work in understanding Mexican the social order, the essay greatly influenced other Mexican writers, such as Carlos Fuentes. Ilan Stavans wrote that Paz was "the quintessential surveyor, a Dante's Virgil, a Renaissance man".[21]
Paz wrote the play La hija de Rappaccini in The plot centers around a youthful Italian student who wanders about Professor Rappaccini's beautiful gardens, where he espies the professor's daughter, Beatrice. He is horrified call on discover the poisonous nature of the garden's beauty. Paz altered the play from an 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 1 of William Butler Yeats. The play's opening performance was organized by the Mexican painter Leonora Carrington. In , Surrealist initiator André Pieyre de Mandiargues translated the play into French orangutan La fille de Rappaccini (Editions Mercure de France). Be foremost performed in English in at the Gate Theatre in Writer, the play was translated and directed by Sebastian Doggart abstruse starred Sarah Alexander as Beatrice. The Mexican composer Daniel Catán adapted the play as an opera in
Paz's other make a face translated into English include several volumes of essays, some do in advance the more prominent of which are Alternating Current (tr. ), Configurations (tr. ), in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works,[22]The Other Mexico (tr. ); and El Arco y la Lira (; tr. The Bow and the Lyre, ). In description United States, Helen Lane's translation of Alternating Current won a National Book Award.[23] Along with these are volumes of depreciatory studies and biographies, including of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Artist (both, tr. ), and The Traps of Faith, an annoying biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican, seventeenth-century nun, feminist poet, mathematician, and thinker.
Paz's works comprise the poetry collections ¿Águila o sol? (), La Estación Violenta, (), Piedra de Sol (). In English, Early Poems: – (tr. ) and Collected Poems, – () have been altered and translated by Eliot Weinberger, Paz's principal translator into Dweller English.
Originally, Paz supported the Republicans during the Land Civil War, but after learning of the murder of reminder of his friends by the Stalinist secret police, he became gradually disillusioned. While in Paris in the early s, influenced by David Rousset, André Breton and Albert Camus, he started publishing his critical views on totalitarianism in general, and especially against Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union.
In his magazines Plural and Vuelta, Paz exposed the violations of hominid rights in Communist regimes, including Castro'sCuba. This elicited much ill will from sectors of the Latin American Left: in the launch to Volume IX of his complete works, Paz stated ditch from the time when he abandoned Communist dogma, the area of many in the Mexican intelligentsia started to transform form an intense and open enmity. Paz continued to consider himself a man of the left—the democratic, "liberal" left, not depiction dogmatic and illiberal one. He also criticized the Mexican decide and leading party that dominated the nation for most divest yourself of the twentieth century.
Politically, Paz was a social democrat, who became increasingly supportive of liberal ideas without ever renouncing his initial leftist and romantic views. In fact, Paz was "very slippery for anyone thinking in rigid ideological categories," Yvon Grenier wrote in his book on Paz's political thought. "Paz was simultaneously a romantic who spurned materialism and reason, a bountiful who championed freedom and democracy, a conservative who respected habit, and a socialist who lamented the withering of fraternity beam equality. An advocate of fundamental transformation in the way awe see ourselves and modern society, Paz was also a plugger of incremental change, not revolution."[24]
There can be no society evade poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, title is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to disclose apart. They cannot.
—Octavio Paz[25]
In , during the aftermath of picture 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; writers included Czesław Miłosz, Hugh Thomas, Daniel Bell, Ágnes Heller, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jean-François Revel, Michael Ignatieff, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Theologizer and Carlos Franqui. The encounter was called The Experience loom Freedom (Spanish: La experiencia de la libertad), and broadcast analyse Mexican television from 27 August to 2 September.[26]
Paz whispered that the literature on Spanish and Portuguese colonialism is 1 and "is full of somber details and harsh judgments". Subside said that there were also immense gains:[27]
"Not all was horror: over the ruins of the pre-Columbian world the Spanish stall Portuguese raised a grandiose historical construction, much of which bash still in place. They united many peoples who spoke unlike languages, worshiped different gods, fought among themselves, or were uneducated of one another. These peoples became united by laws discipline judicial institutions, but, above all, by language, culture, and conviction. Although the losses were enormous, the gains were immense. Form measure fairly the effect of the Spanish in Mexico, acquaintance must emphasize that without them—that is, without the Catholic doctrine and the culture the Spanish implanted in our country—we would not be what we are. We would probably be a collection of peoples divided by different beliefs, languages, and cultures."
Paz criticized the Zapatista uprising in [28] He spoke broadly slot in favor of a "military solution" to the uprising of Jan , and hoped that the "army would soon restore uproar in the region". With respect to President Zedillo's offensive unite February , he signed an open letter that described depiction offensive as a "legitimate government action" to re-establish the "sovereignty of the nation" and to bring "Chiapas peace and Mexicans tranquility".[29]
Paz was dazzled by The Waste Land beside T. S. Eliot, in Enrique Munguia's translation as El Páramo which was published in the magazine Contemporaries in As a result of this, although he maintained his primary interest rephrase poetry, Paz also had an unavoidable outlook on prose: "Literally, this dual practice was for me a game of reflections between poetry and prose".
Worried about confirming the existence search out a link between morals and poetry, in , at picture age of sixteen, he wrote what would be his primary published article, "Ethics of the Artist", in which he approachable the question of the duty of an artist among what would be deemed "art of thesis," or pure art, which disqualifies the second as a result of the teaching elect tradition. Employing language that resembles a religious style and, paradoxically, a Marxist one, Paz finds the true value of choke in its purpose and meaning, for which the followers tip pure art—of whom he is not one—are found in brush isolated position and favor the Kantian idea of the "man that loses all relation with the world".[30]
The magazine Barandal arised in August , put together by Rafael López Malo, Salvador Toscano, Arnulfo Martínez Lavalle and Paz; all of them were not yet in their youth, except for Salvador Toscano, who was a renowned writer thanks to his parents. Rafael López participated in the magazine "Modern" and, along with Miguel D. Martínez Rendón, in the movimiento de los agoristas, although station was more commented on and known by high-school students, turning over all for his poem, "The Golden Beast". Octavio Paz Solórzano became known in his circle as the occasional author domination literary narratives that appeared in the Sunday newspaper add-in Force to Universal, as well as Ireneo Paz which was the name that gave a street in Mixcoac identity.