The Poems of Octavio Paz

by Octavio Paz

  Over the next years, Paz taught at Cambridge University, the University of Texas, and Harvard. In 1971 he returned to Mexico; his shock—after his nearly ten-year absence—at the transformation of Mexico City is recorded in his book of poems Vuelta (Return). He founded a monthly cultural and political magazine, Plural, a supplement to the newspaper Excelsior. In 1976, after a government takeover of the paper, most of the staff of Plural formed another monthly, also called Vuelta, again with Paz as editor. It would last twenty-two years, until his death. Plural and Vuelta were unquestionably the leading intellectual magazines in Latin America of their time, unmatched in their range of concerns and international contributors.

  Besides editing the two magazines, in the 1970s Paz published the previously mentioned book of poems Vuelta (Return); the quadrilingual collaborative poem Renga, based on the Japanese form; the concrete poems of Topoemas; a bilingual collaborative poem with Charles Tomlinson, Hijos del aire/Airborn; the long autobiographical poem, Pasado en claro (translated as A Draft of Shadows); the unclassifiable essay/prose poem/novel set in India, El mono gramático (The Monkey Grammarian); and a large collection of his poetry translations from six languages. He edited an anthology of the writings of Charles Fourier and wrote a book-length study of the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia (published in English as Hieroglyphs of Desire) and an expanded book on Duchamp. Other books of prose included his Harvard lectures on Romanticism and the avant-garde, Los hijos del limo (The Children of the Mire), and four books of essays on literature, politics, and other matters.

  Throughout the 1980s, Paz traveled the world giving readings and lectures, was very much a hands-on editor of Vuelta, gave countless interviews, was embroiled in various literary and political controversies (his anti-authoritarian European-style socialism was considered right-wing by the Latin American left), and had regular programs on Mexican television. Along with his book of poems Árbol adentro (A Tree Within), he published an enormous book on the life and times of the 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; three books of essays; a three-volume edition of his writings on Mexican history, art, and literature; and a commentary on contemporary international politics, Tiempo nublado (published in English as One Earth, Four or Five Worlds).

  Throughout his career, Paz was also actively involved in the visual arts. He wrote countless articles on contemporary and Mexican art and collaborated on projects with Rufino Tamayo, Robert Motherwell, Pierre Alechinsky, Adja Yunkers, Balthus, Antoni Tàpies, Henri Michaux, Roberto Matta, Robert Rauschenberg, Vicente Rojo, and the photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, among many others. His last book of poems, Figuras y figuraciones (Figures & Figurations), was written to accompany the collages created by his wife, Marie-José.

  In 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

  Despite deteriorating health, he wrote eight books of prose in the 1990s, most notably among them, La otra voz (The Other Voice), his second major ars poetica after The Bow and the Lyre; a book-length study of Sade, Un más alla erótico (An Erotic Beyond); Itinerario (Itinerary), an autobiographical meditation on his political evolution from his early Marxism; La llama doble: Amor y erotismo (The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism), the summa of his lifelong reflections on these themes; and Vislumbres de la India (translated as In Light of India), both a memoir and a study of Indian poetry, philosophy, religion, and politics.

  Moreover, he edited, extensively rewrote, and produced new prefaces for a massive fifteen-volume edition of his Complete Works. It includes 1500 pages of poetry and poetry translation; 2600 pages of literary criticism; 900 pages on the visual arts; 1100 pages on politics; 700 pages on philosophy, mythology, and other subjects; 800 pages of selected interviews; and 800 pages of previously uncollected early and late writings.

  Paz died in Mexico City on April 19, 1998, at age eighty-four.

  Eliot Weinberger

  Notes to the Poems

  [Notes and other comments by Paz are marked OP.]

  OP: “These notes, written in the margins, are expendable. They are neither commentaries nor explications. In general, the poems do not need interpretation; or rather, the interpretation of a poem should be made by its reader, not its author. Yet it seems to me useful to include these notes. Useful and, in certain cases, interesting. I have always believed in Goethe’s maxim: all poems are occasional, the products of circumstance. Every poem is a response to an exterior or interior stimulus. The circumstance is that which surrounds us and which, whether as obstacle or spur, is the origin of the poem, the accident that provokes its appearance. But the circumstances are neither explanations nor substitutes for the poems, they are autonomous realities. Poems are born from a circumstance and yet, as soon as they are born, they free themselves and take on a life of their own. In poetry the mystery of human freedom unfolds: accidents, circumstances, are transformed into a work. For this reason, notes are expendable.” (note to A Tree Within, 1988)

  First Poems [1931–1940]

  Juego / Game

  Paz’s first published poem; it appeared in the newspaper El Nacional on June 7, 1931, when Paz was seventeen. Never published in book form until the First Writings volume of the Complete Works in 1998.

  Raíz del hombre / The Root of Man

  OP: “[In the 1930s] it did not seem to me that there was an opposition between politics—which I conceived of in those years as a revolutionary activity—and poetry. For me, poetry was in itself revolutionary. Thus the title of my first book (more babbling than book): The Root of Man. It was erotic poetry and it seemed to me that, for that reason, it was revolutionary. I always used to repeat Marx’s phrase: ‘To be radical is to go to the root.’ Love and sex were the root of men and women. Poetry and revolutionary activity were not essentially different, although their modes of operation were. The contradiction was accidental. The essential contradictions appeared a little later, when I faced the reality of politics and, specifically, revolutionary politics. Nevertheless, for many years after I had lost my faith in Communist revolutionary politics, I still believed that poetry prefigured a true revolution of the spirit.” (interview, 1994)

  from Oda a España / Ode to Spain

  Fragment of a longer poem, published in Beneath Your Bright Shadow and Other Poems on Spain, but never reprinted until First Writings.

  Elegía a un compañero muerto en el frente de Aragón /

  Elegy for a Friend Dead at the Front in Aragón

  The friend was a Catalan anarchist, José Bosch. Paz met him in 1929, when they were both students at a secondary school, where they organized a student strike that landed them in jail for a few nights. Bosch was ultimately deported for his political activities and Paz lost track of him. In Spain in 1937, Paz saw Bosch’s name on a list of the dead; he wrote the poem that was originally called “Elegy for José Bosch, dead at the front of Aragón.” At a rally in Barcelona, Paz was about to read the poem when he spotted Bosch in the audience. Bosch was living a clandestine life, driven half-mad by the Communist persecution of the anarchists. They met briefly the next day. Paz never saw him, or heard about him, again.

  Poems [1941–1948]

  Elegía interrumpida / Interrupted Elegy

  In one of his last interviews, Paz was asked, “What does Octavio Paz think of himself?” He answered by citing a line from this poem, written more than fifty years before: “In a poem, ‘Interrupted Elegy,’ I tell of the dead of my house, and speaking of myself, I ask: ‘Am I the final error of his errors?’ I can’t answer that question.” (In the poem, the line is not a question.)

  greet the sun, spider: Rubén Darío, “Philosophy,” a poem that Darío said “addresses the truth of the natural world and divine reason against ugly, harmful appearances.”Another line in the poem seems apt: “Learn to be what your are, embodied enigmas” (trans. Lysander Kemp).

  Virgen / Virgin

  OP: “[In the 1940s], without clearly understanding what I was doing, I wrote various poems in which, through the juxtaposition of images and verb
al blocks, I tried to express the confluence of different currents of time and space. (I should say that I wrote without understanding everything, not that I wrote blindly. A poet never writes with eyes closed, but rather with eyes half opened, in a penumbra.) Among the poems of this first period, the most complex and, perhaps, the best written is ‘Virgin.’ ” (interview, 1989)

  El prisionerio / The Prisoner

  Paz discovered Sade through the Surrealists, and wrote extensively about the “rebellion of the body” and Sade’s “eroticism converted into philosophy, and philosophy converted into criticism: eroticism at the service of a universal negation.” These writings are collected in English in An Erotic Beyond: Sade.

  from ¿Aguila o sol? / Eagle or Sun? [1949–1950]

  An eagle and a sun are on the obverse and reverse of Mexican coins. “Eagle or sun?” is the Mexican “heads or tails?”

  OP: “[Eagle or Sun?] was an exploration of the mythical subsoil, so to speak, of Mexico, and at the same time a self-exploration. An attempt to create a world of images in which the modern and ancient sensibility were fused, the images of the buried Mexico and those of the modern world. An American friend, Eliot Weinberger, pointed out that there was an analogy between my book and one by William Carlos Williams, published years earlier, and which, of course, I didn’t know: Kora in Hell: Improvisations. The similarity isn’t textual but in their aims. Both books are composed of prose poems, inspired by French poetry. However, Kora in Hell is a deeply American book that could only have been written by an American. In the same way I think Eagle or Sun? could only have been written in Mexico.” (interview, 1970)

  from Trabajos del poeta / The Poet’s Work

  OP: “The title is ironic: the poet’s work consists of listening to the interior works of language and inspiration. It is not pleasant work because one must peer into the abyss that each one of us hides.” (reading, 1981)

  OP: “The subject is the poet’s daily struggles with language and the visions that engender language in consciousness . . . The poet—his consciousness—is a theater of cruel games of language that either provoke or reflect—who knows?—terrible, frightening visions. It is a universal experience, common to everyone. There isn’t anyone who hasn’t seen atrocious figures, beings, or things at the moment of going to sleep or waking up, in half-sleep, when consciousness is besieged by obscure powers. I tried to evoke that nocturnal life, not of unconsciousness but of consciousness, which is a witness, co-conspirator, and victim of passions and of time.” (interview, 1988)

  Mariposa de obsidiana / Obsidian Butterfly

  Obsidian butterfly: OP: “Itzpapolotl, goddess sometimes confused with Teteoinan, our mother, and Tonatzin. All of these female divinities were fused in the cult that, since the sixteenth century, has been worshipping the Virgin of Guadalupe.”

  OP: “I loved and admired André Breton. It’s no exaggeration to say he was a solar figure because his friendship emitted light and heat. Shortly after I met him, he asked me for a poem for a Surrealist magazine. I gave him a prose poem, ‘Obsidian Butterfly.’ He read it over several times, liked it, and decided to publish it. But he pointed out one line that seemed weak. I reread the poem, discovered he was right, and removed the phrase. He was delighted, but I was confused. So I asked him, ‘What about automatic writing?’ He raised his leonine head and answered without changing expression: ‘That line was a journalistic intromission . . .’ ” (interview, 1991)

  Poems [1948–1957]

  Piedras sueltas / Loose Stones [1955]

  OP: “In Loose Stones, the example of Tablada was decisive. I had read Tablada inattentively, but in 1945, the year of his death in New York, I read him again and literally rediscovered him. He opened a path for me. Later, when I was in Japan, I began to read a great deal of Japanese and Chinese poetry, thanks above all to the English translations, which are the best.” [José Juan Tablada, a Mexican poet who lived in Japan for some years, introduced both the haiku and the calligramme into Spanish poetry.]

  “Along with this, the discovery of the pre-Hispanic world. An understanding of pre-Hispanic poetry and art came through modern art. In New York in 1945, I saw many modern paintings and sculptures, which made me realize that an admiration for pre-Columbian art that had been purely archaeological, patriotic, or historical could be converted into aesthetic comprehension. I saw the formal logic of these works, beyond the ideologies of the Aztecs, Mayas, or Olmecs. My relation with Surrealism was decisive for the understanding of pre-Hispanic art.” (interview, 1988)

  Lección de cosas / Object Lesson

  sugar skull: They are eaten in Mexico on November 2, the Day of the Dead.

  Tláloc: The Toltec, and later Aztec, god of rain.

  God that rises from a clay orchid: This tiny, exquisite Jaina Mayan sculpture is in the Brooklyn Museum.

  Xochipilli: Literally, “Flower child,” the Toltec, and later Aztec, god of the arts, poetry, and dance, often represented with tobacco and hallucinogenic mushrooms.

  OP: “Mesoamerican mythology is a theater of prodigious metamorphoses that never had an Ovid. Like heavenly bodies, plants, and animals, the gods continually change and are transformed. Tlaloc, god of rain, appears as a warrior god among the Maya of Yaxchilán; Xochipilli (1 Flower), god of song and dance, turns into Cintéotl, the new corn; Xochiquetzal is the wife of the youth Piltzintecutli, who is none other than Xochipilli, even though, at another moment in the myth, the same goddess turns into the consort of Tezcatlipoca. And which Tezcatlipoca? There are four: the black Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, the jaguar god who in his mirror sees into the depths of men and is turned into his opposite and double, the young Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird, who is the blue Tezcatlipoca. At another point in space appears the white Tezcatlipoca, who is Quetzalcoatl, and at the fourth point, between the green corn and the yellow earth, the red Tezcatlipoca, who is Xipe Totec [the Flayed God]. The gods appear and disappear like stars in the mouth of the night, like a bird between two clouds, like a coyote in the folds of dusk. The gods are time, but not a petrified time. A time in perpetual motion: the dance of metamorphosis, the dance that is the ‘Flower War,’ a cruel and illusory game, a dance of the reflections thrown off by four mirrors that face each other, battle each other, entwine and turn into bonfires, are extinguished and lit again. Who lights them and who puts them out? The Lord of Duality” (“Will for Form,” 1989). [Written as the prologue to the catalog of an exhibition of Mexican art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the essay in Spanish is now called “El águila, el jaguar y la Virgen” (The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Virgin).]

  En Uxmal / In Uxmal

  Uxmal: The Late Classic Maya city in the Yucatán, which flourished from roughly 600–1000 ce.

  from La estación violenta / The Violent Season [1948–1957]

  The book has an uncredited epigraph by Apollinaire (from “La Jolie russe”): “O Soleil c’est le temps de la raison ardente” (“O sun it’s the time of burning reason”). The two previous lines provide the title and context: “Voici que vient l’été la saison violente / Et ma jeunesse est morte ainsi que le printemps” (“Summer comes, the violent season / And my youth has died like the spring”).

  OP: “The book deals with both personal life and our historical epoch. Our epoch, our season, like the summer of an individual life, is violent. The book faces that violent reality, which is both creative and destructive, and asks, ‘What can be salvaged from all this?’ The question is asked to time, that is, to history. All of the poems are a question, a meditation, or a hymn before a city, a landscape, a history.” (interview, 1958)

  OP: “I don’t have the mania for the personal voice. I believe in the coherent work, composed of many voices. The coherence of The Violent Season comes, I think, from the person who speaks: the poet facing modern history. That is, the subject is not really the same as Apollinaire’s, the entry into maturity (the summer), but rather the rising of history through a poetic consciousness.” (interview, 1988)
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  Himno entre ruinas / Hymn Among the Ruins

  William Carlos Williams’s translation of the poem, which mysteriously omits some lines and rewrites the famous ending, is available in Early Poems and Selected Poems. For more on the translation, see Williams, By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish 1916–1959, edited by Jonathan Cohen. Muriel Rukeyser included her translation of the poem in the Selected Poems that she edited and translated for Indiana University Press in 1963—the first Paz collection in English—but chose to use the Williams version when she edited Early Poems; she never reprinted hers. This present version is a composite of the Williams and Rukeyser translations, in an attempt to draw on the strengths of both.

  OP: “Ruins: the discoveries by the archaeologists and the historians, but above all the ruins of the present civilization, which also crumbles away (the sense of the mortality of cultures, in this case our own). The ruins of history, past and present, and the ruins of the individual consciousness. All of these ruins are founded on the image of contemporary society. Modern society and its cities are ruins because they are mere presences, a senseless state of being. History, the city, has lost its meaning, and for that reason, although it still functions, it is a ruin and it is dead. And facing that social reality, the hymn arises, the reality of the moment, which is all of eternity and to which the modern man can aspire. This instant is not purely individual: it is the song of the poet . . . who transfigures time into images and works.” (interview, 1958)