by Octavio Paz
OP: “A plurality of space: ruins of Italy, ruins of Mexico, the future ruins of New York, London, Moscow, the interior ruins of the individual consciousness. The point of union is the ancient sun, fountain of life, that dissolves consciousness—the mirror of Narcissus, patron saint of modern intellectuals—in order for the wellspring of fables to rise again: poetry.” (interview, 1989)
Epigraph: Luis de Góngora, “Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea” (Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea). The passage describes the setting for the cave of Polyphemus, who, of course, figures in the Paz poem.
Máscaras del alba / Masks of Dawn
OP: “In [the poem] there is not a plurality of civilizations or of places but of people and situations. A unity of place and time: Venice in the dawn. A ghostly Venice, like all the creatures of dawn, that moment that the ancients saw with horror: Would the sun rise, would the world keep going?” (interview, 1989)
Mutra
Mutra, more commonly known as Mathura, on the banks of the Yamuna River, was the winter capital of the Kushan Empire in the first to third centuries ce, and is venerated as the birthplace of Krishna. The thick forest of the Krishna legends is now an arid plain. Paz visited shortly after his arrival in India in 1952.
OP: “About my poem, I can say little—I feel remote from its language—except that, as I told Alfonso Reyes in a letter at the time, I wrote it to defend myself against the metaphysical temptation of India. In those days, I had just read some fragments of his translation of the Iliad; the allusions to Greece, in the final stanza, are an echo of that reading. ‘The subject of the poem,’ I wrote in a note years later, ‘is the arrival of summer in the city and the fevers it generates on the earth and in the mind. A subject associated with Hinduism and its search for unity in the plurality of the forms of life. The end of the poem sets against this metahistorical absolute the idea of life as action and heroism which we have inherited from the Greeks.’” (note, 1995)
¿No hay salida? / Is There No Way Out?
A few words have been changed in the Levertov translation—originally titled “The Endless Instant”—to conform to Paz’s revisions.
El río / The River
A few lines of the Blackburn translation have been condensed and rearranged to conform to Paz’s revisions.
El cántaro roto / The Broken Waterjar
huizaches: A kind of acacia tree.
fat cacique of Cempoala: Cempoala was the capital of the Totanacs, in the present-day state of Vera Cruz. They were conquered and oppressed by the Aztecs. “Cacique” means “chief.” Xicomecoatl, nicknamed the “Fat Chief” by the Spaniards, in revenge helped Cortez defeat the Aztecs.
Piedra de sol / Sunstone [1957]
The poem was first published as a pamphlet in 1957 and then included in The Violent Season the following year. Paz considered it both the culmination of his “early” poetry and the beginning of his “later” period. Muriel Rukeyser’s notable translation is available in Configurations and Selected Poems. Four lines of the poem were changed for the Complete Works edition.
OP: “On the title page of this book appears the number 585 written according to the Maya system; the Mexican signs corresponding to Day 4 Olin (Movement) and Day 4 Ehecatl (Wind) appear at the beginning and end of the poem. It may be helpful to point out that the poem is composed of 584 hendecasyllabic lines (the final six syllables are not counted as they are identical to the first six; with them the poem does not end, but rather returns to its beginning). This number of lines is equal to the synodical revolution of the planet Venus, which is 584 days. The ancient Mexicans began their count of the Venusian cycle (and of the other visible planets) with Day 4 Olin. Day 4 Ehecatl, 584 days later, marked the conjunction of Venus and the Sun, the end of one cycle and the beginning of another . . .
“The planet Venus appears twice each day, as the morning star (Phosphorus) and as the evening star (Hesperus). This duality (Lucifer and Vesper) has inspired every civilization, whose people have taken Venus as a symbol, a sign, or a manifestation of the essential duality of the universe. Thus Ehecatl, god of the wind, was one of the incarnations of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, who brings together the two aspects of life. Associated with the moon, dampness, water, the new growth of vegetation, and the death and resurrection of nature, Venus for the ancient Mediterraneans was a knot of images and ambivalent forces: Ishtar, the Lady of the Sun, the Conical Stone, the Uncarved Stone (reminiscent of the ‘uncarved block of wood’ in Taoism), Aphrodite, the quadruple Venus of Cicero, the double goddess of Pausanias, and so on.” (note in the first edition, 1957)
OP: “When I started writing the poem, I didn’t know where it was going. The first lines were dictated, literally dictated. I wrote those lines in a state that was almost like sleepwalking. I was shocked that those lines later struck me as beautiful.” (interview, 1988)
In what may be an elaboration, or a different version, of the origin of the poem, Paz said, in conversation, that the relentless rhythm of the poem came from a long late-night taxi ride in New York City. He had visited a girlfriend on Christopher Street (perhaps the “Phyllis” of the poem); there had been a dramatic scene; and in the early hours of the morning he had gone back to Columbia University, where he was staying. The taxi had a flat tire or a bent axle and rattled: da da dadada DAH, da da dadada DAH (which was slightly elided into the classic Spanish hendecasyllabic).
Epigraph: Richard Sieburth translates Nerval’s lines (in prose) as: “The Thirteenth returns . . . She’s again the first; and still the only one—or the only moment: for are you queen, O, are you the first or the last? are you king, are you the only lover or the last?”
the Reforma: The wide avenue of Mexico City.
Churruca: Cosme Damián de Churruca y Elorza, an admiral of the Spanish Armada, who died in the Battle of Trafalgar. Famous for the line: “If you hear that my ship has been captured, you can assume that I am dead.”
Madero: Francisco Madero, a leader of the Mexican Revolution, who became president and was assassinated by aides to the deposed dictator, Porfirio Díaz.
from Salamandra / Salamander [1958–1961]
Peatón / Pedestrian
Boulevard Sebastó: Familiar name for the Boulevard Sebastopol in Paris.
Pausa / Pause
OP: “Simultaneist poetry—although not with that name—achieved its greatest purity in the work and life of Pierre Reverdy. . . . [His] poetry and criticism demonstrated an understanding of Cubism that was much more lucid than that of Apollinaire. Influenced by that severe aesthetic, Reverdy tended to convert each poem into an object. Not only did he suppress anecdote and music, story and song (the great recourses of Apollinaire), but his extreme asceticism eliminated almost all connectives and relatives. The poem is reduced to a series of verbal blocks without syntactical nexus, joined one to another by the law of attraction of the image.
“Reverdy elaborated a doctrine of the poetic image as autonomous spiritual reality, which, besides influencing André Breton and the Surrealists, marked poets as different as William Carlos Williams and Vicente Huidobro. . . . [His] short compositions, in the manner of Cubist paintings, are windows, but windows that do not look out but in. The poem is a closed space in which nothing happens . . . time is alive, but it is an imprisoned time, a time that does not pass. Reverdy purified simultaneism, and purifying it, he sterilized it. From 1916 until his death, his poetry barely changed. He wrote a great deal over many years, but it was always the same poem. Reverdy is one of the most intense poets of the century, but he is also one of the most monotonous” (The Children of the Mire, 1972). [The English translation of the book, which is considerably shorter than the revised original, does not include the long passage on Reverdy, excerpted here.]
Certeza / Certainty
Despite his complicated, sometimes antagonistic relationship to Paz, Roberto Bolaño took the last line of this poem as the title for his regular newspaper column, collected in English as Between Parentheses.
Paz suggested the translation of the title, which is not quite literal. The Zócalo, Tacuba, and so on are all places in Mexico City.
Vasconcelos: José Vasconcelos, one of the most influential Mexican intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, who, among many other things, reformed the educational system and promoted a culture of mestizaje, the mixing of the Spanish and the indigenous (though at the expense of the indigenous). Paz visited him in 1943 and they discussed Montaigne’s famous line that philosophy prepares one for death. Vasoncelos told Paz: “Philosophy cannot give us life. God gives life and we must ask Him for eternal life, which is the only true life. But it is true that philosophy can help us to die well; it enlightens us about life on earth and thus defends us from death. Since you are not a believer, you can only dedicate yourself to philosophy. In my youth I also lost my faith and that began my vocation as a philosopher. Yes, dedicate yourself to philosophy! It will make you stronger.”
Ortega y Gasset: Paz met the great Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in Geneva in 1953. He told Paz: “We are at the end of an era. Literature is dead. The only thing that remains is thinking: it is the task for our age. Leave poetry and dedicate yourself to thinking! As it’s too late for you to begin Greek, learn the other language of philosophy: German. And forget the rest.”
Cosante
Cosante: OP: “A short composition of rhyming couplets that alternate with a refrain of one or two lines. The word comes from a mistranscription of a French term: cosante = cosaute = coursault, a French court dance of the 15th century. It is a traditional form that has frequently been used in Spanish in this century (Darío, Jiménez, Lorca, Alberti).”
from Ladera este / East Slope [1962–1968]
All the poems in the book were written in India, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), while Paz served as the Mexican ambassador. “A Tale of Two Gardens” was written aboard a ship between Bombay and Las Palmas in November 1968, after he had resigned his post to protest the student massacre. The title is an homage to the Sung Dynasty poet Su Shih (1037–1101), whose pen name was Su Tung-p’o, “East Slope.” Paz read him in Burton Watson’s translation.
El balcón / The Balcony
the Chinese poet: Li Yu (937–978), the last Emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty. The poem, “To the Tune of ‘Ripples Sifting Sand,’ ” also includes the lines: “In dreams I forget I’m a stranger here, / clutching at happiness for a moment.” (trans. Burton Watson)
pilgrim’s steps are a vagabond music: The first line of Góngora’s dedication to the Soledades (Solitudes). Paz suggested this translation of the line, though it is not literal.
El mausoleo de Humayún / Humayun’s Tomb
OP: “Son of Babur, conqueror of India, the emperor Humayun was the father of the great Akbar. The family descends from Timur or Tamerlan, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Near the mausoleum there is, or used to be, one of those centers for the study of what economists and sociologists call ‘underdevelopment,’ bustling with Indian functionaries and foreign ‘experts.’”
En los jardines de los Lodi / In the Lodi Gardens
The tombs of the Lodi Dynasty (1451–1526), now a beautiful park in Delhi. The facades have been cleaned and are no longer black.
El día en Udaipur / The Day in Udaipur
In a rented costume: OP: “In the bazaar of Udaipur there is a shop where grooms—most of them boys from the peasant castes—rent the sumptuous costumes that tradition requires for the wedding ceremony.”
in Kali’s court: OP: “Small goats are sacrificed in the Kali temples. The meat of the decapitated animals is sold to the devout, and the rest given to beggars.”
Over the pale god: OP: “Black Kali dances on the prone (dead or asleep) body of the ascetic Shiva, who is covered with ashes. In her frenzy she decapitates herself.” (Cf. the interpretation of the myth in Heinrich Zimmer’s Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization.)
Felicidad en Herat / Happiness in Herat
OP: “Herat was the center of the so-called ‘Timurian Renaissance’ that restored Islamic civilization in Persia and India. Shah Rakh, son and successor of Timur, was governor of Herat when Clavijo, the Spanish ambassador, visited Samarkand. (On the atmosphere of Herat, see the memoirs of Babur.)”
the wind of the hundred days: Not a poetic invention, but the local name for the wind that blows in the summer.
memorials to a poet-saint: OP: “The Sufi mystic and theologian Hazrat Khwaja Abdullah Ansar. A free spirit, enemy of the orthodoxy and also of superstitions. But now, in the garden which surrounds his tomb, there is an almost withered tree where devotees drive iron nails to ward off the evil eye and to cure toothaches.”
the turquoise cupola: OP: “On the mausoleum of Gahar Shad, Shah Rakh’s wife. It is in a park frequented every Friday by the women of Herat.”
the thirty-two marks: OP: “According to the Mahayana sutras, certain signs and marks appear on the bodies of Bodhisattvas, usually thirty-two in number. Nevertheless, the same texts insist on the illusory nature of these marks: what distinguishes a bodhisattva from other beings is the absence of marks.”
Intermitencias del oeste (3) / Interruptions from the West (3)
OP: “The Organizational Committee of the Cultural Program of the Mexico Olympiad asked me to write a poem celebrating the ‘spirit of the Olympics.’ I declined the invitation, but the turn of events led me to write this small poem in memory of the massacre of Tlatelolco.” (In October 1968 an unknown number—probably in the hundreds—of student demonstrators were massacred in Mexico City by the government shortly before the Olympic Games. In protest, Paz resigned his post as ambassador to India.)
Lectura de John Cage / Reading John Cage
The italicized quotations are from Cage’s book, A Year from Monday.
OP: “My poem about my friend John Cage was written using the I Ching. I threw the coins, which took me to a sign; I opened John’s book and, guided by the sign, found a phrase or two on the page. In the end, the critical conscience: the copied fragment was a sort of pause and I immediately wrote, in the manner of a strophe, another two or three phrases. A collaboration between chance and the creative will. The control of chance but also a disruption of its calculations. The result—apart from any aesthetic appreciation—was surprising.” (interview on the I Ching, 1995)
Nirvana is Samsara, / Samsara is not Nirvana: OP: “Mahayana Buddhist literature, particularly the Tantric, often has the formula ‘Samsara is Nirvana, Nirvana is Samsara.’
It is a phrase which condenses one of the central ideas of the Madhyamika school: the ultimate identicalness of the two realities: phenomenal (Samsara: the cycle of desire ignorant of itself and of its reincarnations) and transcendental (Nirvana: a state of beatitude indefinable except by negation: it is neither this nor that). Samsara and Nirvana are equivalent because both are aspects of the void (sunyata), and the true sage transcends their apparent duality. But the poem says something slightly different . . .”
Viento entero / Wind from All Compass Points
A few lines have been added to the Blackburn translation to correspond to Paz’s revisions.
OP: “The first stanza refers to the bazaar in Kabul and the river that crosses the city; the second to a neighborhood in Paris; the others, to various places in northern India, western Pakistan, and Afghanistan.”
A great flock of crows: Rubén Darío, “Canto de esperanza” (Song of Hope). The poem opens: “A great flock of crows stains the heavenly blue. / A millennial wind brings threats of plague. / Men are being murdered in the Far East.”
Santo Domingo: OP: “The poem was written during the American intervention in the Dominican Republic.”
“If we had the munitions”: OP: “Mexican history schoolbooks attribute this statement to General Anaya when he surrendered the Plaza de Churrubusco to General Scott, the head of the U.S. troops that invaded Mexico in 1847.”
Dat
ia: OP: “The palace-castle in the walled city of the same name, in Madhya Pradesh. Built on a black craggy promontory, it towers over the city and the plain. According to Fergusson, it is the finest example of palace architecture of the seventeenth century. It was built by Raja Bir Singh Deo, a military man pledged to the Emperor Jahangir. Seen from the plains, it looks like a giant iceberg of stone; half the structure is hidden by the rock, which has been excavated to form rooms and galleries. Datia was never inhabited, except by bats, snakes, and scorpions: its owner was assassinated before he could move in, and since then no one else has dared try. The perfect geometry of its courtyards, rooms, and galleries evokes not so much the castles of Sade, but the feverish and circular rigor of his thought. A solipsism of stone responding (corresponding) to verbal solipsism. Love is inseparable from eroticism but it crosses through it unharmed.”
At the top of the world: OP: “The great god Shiva (Mahadeva) and Parvati, his consort, live on Mount Kailasa, in the Himalayas.”
In a fig leaf you sail: OP: “An allusion to the children’s book, Almendrita (Little Almond).
Con los ojos cerrados / With Eyes Closed
Paz notes that “piedra ciega” (blind stone) is a precious stone that has no transparency, and “piedra franca” (frank stone) is one that is easy to carve. A jeweler tells me there are no English equivalents.
Maithuna
OP: “Maithuna: the erotic couples that cover the walls of certain Buddhist and Hindu temples; sexual union; the path of illumination, in Tantric Buddhism and Hinduism, through the conjunction of karuna (passion) and prajna (wisdom). Karuna is the masculine side of reality and prajna the feminine. Their union is sunyata, the void . . . empty of its emptiness.” Paz also notes that the seventh section of the poem is an imitation of Li Po.