The Poems of Octavio Paz

by Octavio Paz

  Domingo en la isla de Elefanta / Sunday on the Island of Elephanta

  OP: “The sculpture in the seventh-century Shivaite caves of Elephanta, near Bombay, is among the most beautiful in Indian art. The reliefs represent scenes from the legends of Shiva and Parvati. The religious fervor of the Portuguese mutilated, but did not destroy, their beauty.”

  Cuento de dos jardines / A Tale of Two Gardens

  OP: “There are many gardens in my poems and all of them are the same garden: it is the space of revelation. The garden is nature but it is a transfigured nature. The garden is one of the oldest myths and appears in all civilizations. Think of Eden, the Earthly Paradise. It is the lost kingdom: the innocence of the first day. The garden symbolizes the primordial unity, founded on the pact among all living beings. In paradise, water speaks and talks with the tree, with the wind, with the insects. Everything communicates, everything is transparent. Man is part of all. The breaking of the pact, the expulsion from the garden, is the beginning of the immense cosmic solitude: things, from atoms to stars, fall into themselves, in their solitary reality; men fall into the transparent abyss of consciousness, in its endlessness. . . . The garden restores, however partially and provisionally, the pact of the beginning, the original unity of the couple, the reconciliation with the cosmic totality. In some of my poems, despite their obvious imperfections, there is that aspiration toward that first reality the garden symbolizes in its fantastic geometry made of sky and water, trees and grass, flowers, birds, dogs, insects, reptiles, cats. The garden is the theater of the games of my childhood and the passionate games of love. In my case, two gardens: that of my childhood, in Mixcoac, and that of my maturity, in Delhi.” (interview, 1994)

  Ajusco: Volcano in the Valley of Mexico.

  Almendrita: “Little Almond,” character in the children’s book of that name, who also appears in the poem “Wind from All Compass Points.”

  yakshi: Female deity of trees and plants.

  Prajnaparamita: OP: “Prajna is wisdom and paramita is perfection: Perfect Wisdom; the other bank; a female deity of Mahayana Buddhism, like our Sophia; woman and, in Tantric Buddhism (Vajrayana), her vulva; the plenitude in the void.”

  Nagarjuna: Buddhist philosopher of the second century. OP: “The form of Buddhism that most interests me . . . is Mahayana, and especially the teacher Nagarjuna: it is the paradox of a total negation of life, a radical skepticism, a genuine nihilism that, strangely, allows you to reconcile yourself with life. I can love the world, women, the sun, and still realize that all of it is an illusion.” (interview, 1996)

  Dharmakirti: OP: “The strict Buddhist logician of the seventh century was also the author of a number of erotic poems that were collected in Vidyakara’s Treasury. The combination is less strange than it might seem: in India nearly all the important philosophers were also poets.”

  Blanco [1966]

  Blanco was originally published as a single folded sheet, with various typefaces in black and red. In 1995, Paz, an enthusiastic proponent of television as a vehicle for poetry, made a video of the poem—surely the earliest done by a major poet. (In the late 1960s he had written a film script for Blanco—a film that would consist only of letters and sounds.) In 2011, Conaculta in Mexico released an “interactive” version for the iPad.

  OP: “Blanco: white; blank; an unmarked space; emptiness; void; the white mark in the center of a target.

  “As it is not possible to reproduce here all the characteristics of the original edition of the poem, it should be said that Blanco was meant to be read as a succession of signs on a single page. As the reading progresses, the page unfolds vertically: a space which, as it opens out, allows the text to appear and, in a certain sense, creates it. It is something like the motionless voyage offered by a scroll of Tantric pictures and emblems: as we unroll it, a ritual is spread out before our eyes, a sort of procession or pilgrimage to—where? Space flows, engenders a text, dissolves it—it passes as though it were time. This arrangement of temporal order is the form adopted by the course of the poem: its discourse corresponds to another which is spatial: the separate parts that make up the poem are distributed like the sections, colors, symbols, and figures of a mandala. . . . The typography and format of the original edition of Blanco were meant to emphasize not so much the presence of the text but the space that sustains it: that which makes writing and reading possible, that in which all writing and reading end.

  “Blanco is a composition that offers the possibility of variant readings:

  a) in its totality, as a single text;

  b) the center column, excluding those to the left and right, is a poem whose theme is the passage of the word from silence to silence, passing through four stages: yellow, red, green, and blue;

  c) the lefthand column is a poem divided into four moments corresponding to the four traditional elements;

  d) the righthand column is another poem, in counterpoint to the left, and composed of four variations on sensation, perception, imagination, and understanding;

  e) each of the four parts formed by the two columns may be read, ignoring the division, as a single text—four independent poems;

  f) the center column may be read as six separate poems; those of the left and right as eight.”

  OP: “The poem is made of separate parts, like a jigsaw puzzle. The reader can associate or disassociate the parts—there are more than twenty possibilities. Each part is in itself a poem and each association or disassociation produces a text. Thus, unlike a jigsaw puzzle that has only one solution, one figure, in Blanco there are more than twenty figures, more than twenty texts. Each text is separate and all of them say the same thing. The extreme mobility of Blanco results in immobility. Exactly the opposite of Sunstone, which is a lineal poem that flows continually, Blanco tends to crystallize, that is to say, to turn into a mere verbal transparency—to dissipate. That’s why it’s called Blanco. It is the negation of Sunstone in that, in a certain way, it denies time. Only the present is a presence: the feminine body seen, touched, smelled, sensed like a landscape, and both, the earth and woman, gone through and read like a text, heard and spoken like a poem. Blanco is a body made of words. A body that is spoken and, upon speaking it, dissipates. At least that’s what I wanted it to be.” (interview, 1972)

  OP: “Blanco is ruled more by space than by time. It is a poem based on a triple analogy or likeness: woman, the word, and the world. The three elements are in perpetual communication and metamorphosis: the woman is transformed into a meadow, river or mountain; the earth, water, or air turn into language. Each element is also its negation: the woman, who is the apparition of the presence, is also its disappearance; the word, which is silence before being a word, returns to silence; the reality of the world is its unreality (or is it the opposite?). The poem has a beginning and end: it is time that passes. But ‘Blanco’ is organized spatially and follows the direction of the four cardinal points. I was inspired by the mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism, which divide space into four regions, four colors, four female divinities, four Buddhas or bodhisattvas. In the center, the central god. Blanco preserves the spatial division, the elements and the faculties (sensation, perception, imagination, and understanding) of the tantras. To write ‘Blanco’ was, for me, an attempt to return to space. It is our lost country. In the West, time—in its most energetic and cruel form: action, with its illusion of change—has turned us into wanderers, endlessly expelled from ourselves. To touch a body, to see a hill, to stretch out under a tree is to return to that which is most ancient, to the lost country, to the space from which we arose and to which we will return.” (interview, 1979)

  Epigraph: Avec le seul objet . . . : Stéphane Mallarmé, “Ses pur ongles très haut dediant leur onyx,” often called “Sonnet en ix”: “With this sole object by which Nothingness honors itself.” Richard Sieburth points out the pun “s’honore / sonore,” the sonorous Void. Paz has a long untranslated essay on this poem.

  Patience patience . . . rive
r rising a little: The entire entry (written in two lines) for February 14, 1863 (Valentine’s Day), from David Livingstone’s diaries. Its appearance in the poem is a mystery. Paz apparently found it in a beautifully printed small book titled David Livingstone and the Rovuma, edited by George Shepperson and published by Edinburgh University Press in 1965. Most of the terse entries deal with fevers, hunting, and logistical difficulties, and seem to have no connection to the poem. But they appear almost like small poems on the page, and Paz no doubt would have liked the entry for the previous day:

  remove her up a little—Rains

  Fire flies flash simultaneously & make a beautiful lightning

  gleam over the tops of the tall grasses

  water and coals: The “burnt water” of

  he Aztecs. [See note to the poem “Return,” below.]

  “the tall beasts with shining skins”: Sonnet 465 by Francisco de Quevedo, “Retrato de Lisi que traía en una sortija” (Portrait of Lisi That He Carried in a Ring), which contains the famous line: “I hold all the Indies in my hand.” (That line—translated as Indias” rather than “Indies”—is also the title of a series of artworks by Anselm Kiefer.) Paz cites this poem in a discussion of Quevedo as an “excremental poet” in Conjunctions and Disjunctions.

  Key background texts for Blanco are David Snellgrove, The Hevjara Tantra, and Giuseppe Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala.

  from Vuelta / Return [1969–1975]

  Trowbridge Street

  Paz lived on Trowbridge Street, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he was teaching at Harvard in the early 1970s.

  Vuelta / Return

  Epigraph: OP: “In the last years of the Mexican Revolution, López Velarde went back to his village and, encountering the destruction of the civil war, wrote, ‘with a deep reactionary sadness,’ ‘The Malefic Return,’ a poem in which he calls his birthplace a ‘subverted paradise.’ I, too, after many years of absence, returned to the place where I was born—but I did not find a Mexico City wracked by civil war but rather degraded by modern progress, the lucre of the capitalists, the megalomania of the political rulers, and the sordid fantasies of the middle class.” (letter to Julián Ríos, 1971)

  They are burning / millions . . . of old notes: A job Paz had as a young man.

  I look back / that passerby / nothing now but mist: A haiku by Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902).

  whores / pillars of vain night: A line from “Crepúsculos de la ciudad II” (Twilights in the city II), an early, untranslated Paz sonnet. OP: “The funeral parlors no longer exhibit coffins in the show windows and the police have dispersed the prostitutes that used to walk on those streets, but the authorities have been unable to suppress either prostitution or death.” (letter to Julián Ríos, 1971)

  atl tlachinolli: OP: “A Nahuatl expression meaning ‘(something) burnt / water.’ The opposition of water and fire is a metaphor for cosmic war, which is modeled, in turn, on the wars between men. The hieroglyph atl tlachinolli appears time and again on Aztec monuments, particularly on the bas-reliefs of the teocalli of the sacred war. Cities and civilizations are founded on an image: the union of opposites, water and fire, was the metaphor for the foundation of the city of Mexico. The image appears in other civilizations—Novalis’s ‘wet flame,’ for example—but nowhere else has it so totally inspired a society as in the case of the Aztecs. Although the meaning of atl tlachinolli was religious and military, the vision that the metaphor unfolds before our eyes goes beyond the imperialist idea to which it has been reduced. It is an image of the cosmos and man as a vast contradictory unity. Tragic vision: the cosmos is movement, and the axis of blood of that movement is man. After wandering for some centuries, the Mexica founded Mexico Tenochtitlan precisely in the place indicated in the auguries of their god Huitzilopochtli: the rock in the lake; on the rock, a nopal cactus, the plant whose fruit symbolizes human hearts; on the nopal, an eagle, the solar bird that devours the red fruit; a snake; white water; trees and grass that were also white . . . ‘Atl tlachinolli: the clear and lovely fountain that day gushed a reddish color, almost like blood, and split into two streams, and in the second stream the water was so blue it was cause for wonder.’ (Codex Ramirez: Account of the Origin of the Indians Who Inhabit This New Spain, According to Their Stories, 16th Century)”

  the $ sign: The sign not only for the U.S. dollar, but for the Mexican peso.

  A la mitad de esta frase / In the Middle of this Phrase

  unused light: Fray Luis de León, “A Francisco de Salinas.” The whole poem is worth examining for its resonances in the Paz poem.

  Petrificada petrificante / The Petrifying Petrified

  the eye of the dog of the dead: OP: “Xolotl, the double of Quetzalcoatl; the god who, in penance, pulled out an eye and descended to the underworld in the form of a dog.”

  Navel of the Moon: OP: “Mexico is a word composed of metzli (moon), xictli (navel), and co (place): the place of the navel of the moon; that is, in the navel of the Lake of the Moon, as the lake of Mexico was called.”

  Chanfalla’s scam: Cervantes, El retablo de las maravillas (The Puppet Show of Wonders). Chanfalla’s miraculous theater, presented without puppets on an empty stage, is supposed to be visible to anyone who was born in wedlock and is an Old Christian, with no trace of Jewish or Muslim blood. The townspeople, seeing nothing, begin to doubt their ancestry, but of course display their enthusiasm for the spectacle.

  Nocturno de San Ildefonso / San Ildefonso Nocturne

  The National Preparatory School, which Paz attended, is in the former college of San Ildefonso, built by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century.

  a sky of soot: Ramón López Velarde, “Día 13” (The 13th day).

  C’est la mort—ou la morte: “She is death—or dead.” Gérard de Nerval, “Artémis.” A stanza from the same poem is the epigraph to “Sunstone.”

  Alyosha K and Julien S: Alyosha Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.

  Pasado en claro / A Draft of Shadows [1974]

  The Spanish title means “clean copy” (as in the preparation of a manuscript) but with the added resonance of pasado (past / passed) and claro (clear or bright, in all their uses). The English title is a collaborative invention.

  OP: “A Draft of Shadows was an evocation and a convocation (an exorcism?) of my childhood and adolescence. Remembering, I wrote; and writing, I invented. It was not a resurrection of the past; or more exactly, every resurrection was a birth, every birth a transfiguration. Memory is the principal poetic faculty because of its immense capacity for invention. I would remember a place and, seeing it with the eyes of the mind—with the eyes of my words—I would ask myself: ‘Was I there or am I here?’ ” (interview, 1988)

  OP: “In A Draft of Shadows there is the gaze: the man who writes and the man who sees himself writing. The man who writes is inventing a garden, a room; he’s inventing his own past, his own childhood. He remembers and, remembering, invents. At the same time, the man who is watching is also inventing. He’s inventing another text. This silent dialogue, made of gazes, invents, within the text, a third text made of [mirror] reflections. . . . Poetry is simultaneously a way of apprehending reality and a way of expressing it.” (interview, 1996)

  I gathered wood with the others: The Iliad, Book XXIV, the funeral of Hector.

  I wandered on the floating grove: Garcilaso de la Vega, “Egloga I” (Eclogue I).

  I saw . . . the shades clustered: The Odyssey, Book XI, the shade of Achilles; the scene that is also the opening of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

  I swam in the grotto with the siren: Gérard de Nerval, “El desdichado.” Nerval’s line is: “I have dreamed in the grotto where the siren swims.”

  fendendo i drappi . . . : Purgatorio, Canto XIX. Dante’s dream of the Siren, who is then “seized and laid bare in front” by Virgil: “rending her garments and showing me her belly: this waked me with the stench that issued therefrom�
� (trans. Charles Singleton).

  Do not move this stone : Palatine Anthology, Book VII, Anonymous.

  freckled pears . . . Villaurrutia: Xavier Villaurrutia (1903–1950), Mexican poet; subject of Paz’s book-length study, translated in English as Hieroglyphs of Desire. The line comes from a very early poem where the sun “bruñe cada racimo, cada pecosa pera” (burnishes every cluster of grapes, every freckled pear). Villaurrutia recounts how, at age fifteen, he went to visit Ramón López Velarde and showed him a manuscript of his poems. López Velarde underlined that line a number of times and declared it was the one line worth keeping.

  Carlos Garrote: The hot-blooded royalist half brother in Benito Pérez Galdos’ Episodios Nacionales.

  Isis and Lucius the ass: Apuleius, The Metamorphosis (The Golden Ass), Book XI.

  Nemo and the squid: Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (Captain Nemo battles an octopus in Spanish, a squid in English. In writing his book, Verne capitalized on the recent and sensational discovery of a giant squid—but the French, for some reason, insisted on still calling it a poulpe. The Spanish translation followed the French, but the English, not untypically for the time, corrected it for scientific accuracy.)

  Oh madness of discourse: Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida.

  color ferrigno: “the color of iron”: The description of Malebolge that opens Canto XVIII of the Inferno.

  from Árbol adentro / A Tree Within [1976–1988]

  Decir: hacer / To Speak: To Act

  Written for a memorial for the linguist Roman Jakobson, whom Paz first met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1971. OP: “He talked like a professor, kept silent like a sage, and laughed like a friend.”

  Bashō-An

  OP: “In about 1670 Matsuo Bashō traveled on foot through the mountains and valleys surrounding Kyoto, composing poems. He stayed for a short while in a tiny hut next to the Kompukuji temple. In memory of the poet, they have named the hut Bashō-An. In 1760 another poet and painter, Yosa Buson, visited the same places and discovered the ruins of Bashō’s cabin. He moved nearby and, with the help of three disciples, rebuilt the hut. Buson died in 1783. His tomb was erected there, as were the tombs of his other poet-disciples. In 1984 my wife and I visited Bashō-An, a place as solitary now as it was three hundred years ago.”