© Opale

Octavio PAZ

Nobel Prize 1990

 

"For impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity"

 

Octavio Paz was born on the 31st of March 1914 in Mexico City. His paternal grandfather was an important liberal intellectual, who was one of the first novelists to write about Indians. Thanks to him and his considerable library, Octavio Paz was introduced to literature at an early age. Reading Proust in particular was a revelation.

His father, Octavio Paz Solórzano, was a very active political journalist and lawyer who, with other progressive intellectuals, joined the movement led by Emiliano Zapata. He was in fact Zapata’s secretary. Josephina Lozano, his mother, was a Spanish woman, the daughter of Andalusia immigrants. The Paz family was exiled to the USA when Zapata was assassinated. On their return, Octavio Paz studied law and literature at University, but refused to take his exams. His ambition was to be a poet.

At the age of 17, Octavio Paz founded an avant-garde review in which his first poems would appear, two years later. He created a school for young workers. In 1933 he published his first collection, Luna Silvestre. In 1937 he left for Spain, for Valencia, to fight in the civil war. There he met Pablo Neruda, with whom he became friends, and who encouraged him to write. Supporting the struggle of republicans and the anti-fascist combat, he participated in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. He met Andre Malraux and Andre Gide. In 1937, he married Elena Garro, a Mexican writer. They got divorced n 1959. Together they had two children Jesus and Helena.

Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he was one of the co-founders of the review Taller (Workshop) (1938-1941). Directed by Rafael Solena, this review was where the young poets of new generation and a new literary scene were to be discovered.

In 1943 he traveled to the USA on a Guggenheim grant, where he discovered modern Anglo-American modern poetry. Two years later he entered into the Mexican diplomatic service and found himself in France in 1946, where he wrote his fundamental study on Mexican identity: The Labyrinth of Solitude, published in 1950. Moreover he actively participated in publications and activities organized by the Surrealist movement with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret. Benjamin Peret would translate Sun Stone, a poem that was published in 1957, and appeared in the collection Freedom of Words that assembled his poems of the period 1935-1957. The poem Sun Stone refers to Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec mythology, and the goddess of love in the Western imagination - an ode to eroticism.

Disgusted by Stalinism, he rejected the left wing when the Cold War began. As a result of this position, he was radically different from Pablo Neruda, who remained a communist throughout his while life, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez who defended the revolution in Cuba. Paz’s friendship with these two would suffer as a result.

His diplomatic career took him to India, Switzerland and Japan.

In 1962 Paz was named Mexican Ambassador to India. It was an important period in his career, during which he wrote several works including The Grammarian Monkey. He met the Frenchwoman Marie-Jose Tramini, who became his second wife. He wrote Alternating Current, a collection of literary and political essays in 1967, and a collection on Claude-Levi Strauss in 1967, and one on Marcel Duchamp in 1968.

He left his post as ambassador in 1968, as a sign of protest against the violent and bloody repression his government imposed against students of Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico.

From 1968 to 1970, Paz was a professor of South American literature at the Universities of Texas, Austin. Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He equally taught at Harvard and Cambridge during 1971-1972. During these years he wrote, amongst others Posdata (1970), an interpretation of the errors of the Mexican political system and its relation to culture.

From this point, Octavio Paz dedicated himself to his work as an editor, having founded two reviews consecrated to arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976), in which some of the most important writers of the following generation collaborated, and Vuelta (1976), which he would edit until the end of his life.

Los Hijos del Lomo (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German romanticism to the avant-garde of the 1950s. Even if Paz was known as a defender of neo-liberalism, he criticised the weakness of this kind of democracy in Tiempo Nublado (1983), La Otra Voz (1990) and Itinerario (1993). In 1989 he received the title of Docteur Honoris Causa of Harvard University, He received the Cervantes Prize in 1981, the most prestigious award of the Hispanic world, and the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982. But his greatest achievement was in 1990, when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In Essays on Mexican Art, published in 1993, Paz explores the world of pre-Columbian art, and also contemplates the painting of Rufino Tamayo and Frieda Kahlo.

In 1996 a fire in his home destroyed a large part of his books and his paintings. His last public appearance was in December 1997 at the opening ceremony of the foundation that bore his name, in the presence of the President Ernesto Zedillo.

When he died on the 19th of April 1998, the greatest authors of modern times were unwavering in their praise of him: “I think that with Octavio Paz disappears one of the greatest figures of contemporary culture. As a poet, essayist, thinker, he left a profound mark, he left admirers and adversaries moved by his ideas, by his aesthetic images, and the values that he defended with intelligence and passion…” ( Mario Vargas Llosa )