The Works by Octavio Paz , Configure a social and cultural imaginary impossible to be separated from Mexican history, and in itself, from universal literature.
In the late nineties, the poet went from combining his political activity as ambassador of Mexico and his career as a writer to become the first official representative of Mexican letters winning a Nobel Prize for literature.
A versatile translator, poet and essayist, the aesthetics of Octavio Paz is easy to find if one follows the path of romanticism, symbolism and surrealism that he approached on numerous occasions. The writer, obstinate in attaining the beauty of the words and the mechanisms that conformed them, explored and dynamized almost all poetic styles in order to find them.
In this sense, this was one of Octavio Paz's great contributions to literature: his attitude and commitment to the historical role that poetry and speech should have in the new period of political, social and cultural changes that the twentieth century.
Unlike the romantic authors, Octavio Paz did not use most of his time to lock himself in his tower to analyze all this set of facts. Instead, the young grandson and son of revolutionary intellectuals took to the streets to join the student revolts and promoted culture and education in his country.
Akin to the social cause, although from an intellectual point of view, Octavio Paz found through poetry a bond of union and solidarity with Spanish republican writers.
Thus, in his poetry and work would very early influence authors like Rafael Alberti Who, from his exile in Mexico, described the verses of the young poet as"revolutionaries", not because of his political zeal but because of his capacity to restructure language.
In this sense, Octavio Paz To his visionary character in saying that he was one of the first authors to take an interest in the themes of postmodern literature such as: language criticism, the role of mass society, rejection of progress (against modern theory) Or the combination of genres.
From this perspective, renovating the author is recommended to read the following works that follow:
Selected works of Octavio Paz
1- Wild Moon
Under the seal of the publishing house Fábula, Octavio Paz published his first collection in 1933 with just 18 years, the same year in which he founded the magazine Cuadernos of the Valley of Mexico.
In these early verses the author's youth can already guess his facet of romantic writer. As a curiosity Wild moon Only consists of seven poems divided into just forty pages dealing with love, poetry and women.
As curiosity, the poetry was little known at the time because of the scarce print run and lack of appearance in the press.
2- They will not pass!
This book was a joint response by the author to the Spanish Republican forces at war. In 1936, the Mexican publisher Simbad publishes a single poem in the form of a booklet titled: Not pass! , Which recalled the cry of struggle led by supporters of the democratic side for the defense of Madrid before the army of the future dictator Francisco Franco.
Following the success of this book, Octavio Paz was invited by the Republican forces to the Second International Congress of Antifascist Intellectuals of Spain. With this collection, the poet was not only recognized on both sides of the pond by authors such as Rafael Alberti, Vicente Huidobro or Antonio Machado, but also began to establish himself as the great universal poet of Mexican letters of the twentieth century.
3- Under your clear shadow and other poems about Spain
A year later, and in this close political relation of the writer with the mother country, his poem Not pass! Was reedited again by the writer Manuel Altolaguirre in 1937 under a poetic anthology called Under your clear shadow and other poems about Spain .
The Spanish essayist Juan Gil-Albert applauded the initiative of Octavio Paz in writing how the verses of the Mexican author did not in any way express a false concern or abandonment towards the critical situation of the republican troops.
4- Between the stone and the flower
This time, instead of looking beyond its borders, Octavio Paz reprized his gaze towards the horizon of the most ancient Mesoamerica. In this way, it publishes Between stone and flower , In the exercise of analysis and reflection of the evolution of the descendants of the Aztec people.
At present, the book is considered one of its first long poems because it consists of four parts clearly delineated according to the four main natural elements: stone, earth, water and light.
The first two allude to the social and economic reference of Mesoamerican civilization, the third focuses on the figure of the peasant and the fourth on the consequences of the cultural imposition that has had the capitalist system against this people.
The book is influenced by the trip that would start again Octavio Paz to the United States in 1943 thanks to the grant of the grant Guggenheim Foundation with which it was able to come into contact with English and American poetry.
In this line, the contact with poets like Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens or T.S. Elliot would mark a before and after in his style. The poetry of the writer would be freed from the old ties of Mexican poetry to introduce new elements of postmodern lyric aesthetics such as the use of free verse, historical daily detail or the conjunction of colloquial dialogues with strong traditional images.
5- The labyrinth of loneliness
At the end of 1945 the Mexican poet marched to Paris in order to be part of the diplomatic service of Mexico, position that would occupy during 23 years of his life. The French capital not only implied in the writer an opportunity to get in touch with the surrealism of André Bretón but a cultural change influenced at all levels.
In addition to his strong poetic character, Octavio Paz is recognized by the numerous essays he wrote as The Labyrinth of Solitude , Edited by the influential magazine American Notebooks In 1950.
The Labyrinth of Solitude Is a book of head for the historiography of Mexico since in it Octavio Paz focuses on performing a psychological introspection of the Mexican subject, looking for its identity along the historical future.
The book was reissued in the late sixties just as it began to be recognized by its readers. Its subsequent success was such that today it is part of the collective imagination of Mexico, being an essential work in the educational programs of colleges and pre-university centers of the country.
6- Eagle or sun?
Published in 1951, Eagle or sun? Is a path of mystical knowledge that leads the writer to find himself through the three parts that structure the book written in prose and poetry. With him is confirmed his genius as a poet and evidence the influence there is in his style of Rafael Alberti or Jorge Guillén.
The first part, entitled Forced labor, Is marked by its character of learning. In it it tries to look for the paper of the words and to purge all the evils and vices to arrive at the poetic purity.
The author then introduces quicksand , Where he helped a series of short stories in prose to leave them and thus reach the luminosity that leads to his third and final part titled as the name of the book, that is, Is it an eagle or a sun?
7- Rappaccini's daughter
In 1956 he published in Revista Mexicana de Literatura, Which will be the only play of the poet with the title The daughter of Rappaccini. The piece consists of a single act and is based on a story by the American Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was represented in that same year under the direction of Héctor Mendoza in the Theater of the Caballito of Mexico.
The version of Octavio Paz is a drama readapted to the stage with gesture of fable where each personage turns out to be the allegory of a human feeling. The work is full of surrealistic nuances that try to expose the links between love, life and death.
8- The bow and lyre
As a poet, Octavio Paz meditates on this essay of 1956 on poetry and the elements that compose it so that it becomes meaningful as rhythm, language or image. In turn, the writer makes a special mention to the treatment of poetry and prose and the revelatory power that has the inspiration in the creative path.
Roughly, The bow and the lyre Is composed as a mature essay where the writer can answer a question that will disturb him as a teenager: the poetic phenomenon. And to which he will refer for the first time in a published text, as an anteroom, within the number five of the magazine The prodigal son With the title Poetry under solitude and poetry of communion.
Roughly, The bow and the lyre Is part of a fundamental work of the essayist trajectory of the author and that would leave to guess what would be the aesthetic thinking of the future Nobel Prize. Thanks to this piece, the writer won the Xavier Villaurrutia prize in Mexico, the country's highest recognition of a specific book.
9- The elm pears
After typing The bow and the lyre , Octavio Paz publishes this book in 1957 with essay writing. In this case the author looks in his first part towards his native Mexico, doing a study on Mexican poetry through the eyes of the writer Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and the poets Juan Jose Tablada and Jose Gorostiza.
In the second part, perhaps more versatile, the author makes an incursion into literature and Japanese art and poetry that fascinated him so much. In turn, he ventures with film criticism showing interest in Luis Buñuel's surrealist exhibition on the big screen. The book also collects incursions of the writer within the literary journalism.
10- Sun stone
Proof of this accuracy and poetic care of the writer is Stone sun, A 1957 poem composed of 584 endecasílabos (verses of 11 syllables) published within the collection Tezontle of the Fund of Economic Culture.
In the poem the poetic self makes a journey, in 584 verses, through another beloved body, just as Venus begins his journey towards the sun in 484 days. The conjunction between poetry and human fragility is carried out by means of the great quantity of images that allude to the nature and to the tempestuous step of the time.
As a curiosity, the poem ends just as it begins, always remembering the cycles of life that include a beginning and an end:"... a river walk that curves, advances, retreats, takes a detour and always arrives."
11- The violent season
Returning to Mexico from abroad, Octavio Paz published in 1958, The Violent Season, a book cataloged as one of the poet's most influential poems at that time for his creative wealth and the disengagement he felt with the Mexican poets who were still betting By the old forms.
After returning to the native country, the writer became one of the greatest exponents of cultural change, finding in a group of young writers, among whom was Carlos Fuentes, a force of struggle to renew in Mexico the artistic and literary life.
In this poems of intimate court is a song at the end of the youth of the writing. In it, poems like Anthem among ruins, Sun Stone , Sources or Mutra, the latter Written during his stay in India as ambassador. The verses in this book are full of the spiritual encounter experienced in his previous trips to Japan, where his links with the East began to grow.
The contact with poetic forms of Japan like the haiku poem helped him to economize the language of his poetry to say in a few words an intense emotion. To simultaneously conjoin it with the idea of the unfinished verse, something totally unthinkable at the time for the Spanish tradition.
12- Freedom on the word
The title of this work refers to a paradoxical conception of freedom, which must be limited by something, just as poetry is conditioned by language.
This poetic anthology reissued in 1960 includes the poem mentioned Sun Stone And the poems of Octavio Paz written between 1935 and 1957. It is one of the first great anthologies of the writer and is considered as one of the most important Spanish lyric works of the twentieth century because of its breakthrough character. The first version of the book was written as proof with the name of Still In 1942 to be published in 1949.
In this line, the poems Parole Is an open witness of his time since in him can be traces of currents and movements artistic and literary as surrealism. As a feature to emphasize, the book stands as a vanguard publication in full swing of the same.
In it, the new parameters of contemporary Spanish-American poetry can be found. In fact, in one of the poems that includes, Anthem among ruins , Emerges simultaneism, a new artistic form devised by the writer.
For writers and Mexican scholars of the stature of Alberto Ruy Sánchez, this work is a mature formulation of Octavio Paz next to The Labyrinth of Solitude Y Is it an eagle or a sun? In his stage as a writer in the late forties.
13- Whole wind
It is necessary to make a break in this list to make a brief note to Full Wind , One of the longest and most symbolic poems of Octavio Paz, dedicated to what would be his great love until the day of his death, Marie Jose Tramini.
It is said that the Mexican writer arrived in 1962 to a diplomatic reception in a house in New Delhi where he found Marie Jose Tramini, then wife of the political advisor of the French Embassy, along with a political group and her husband during a conversation in the garden.
His infatuation was such that soon he would write this poem enveloped by the Buddhist environment he attended as ambassador of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the poem of nine stanzas, a common element appears in the poetics of the author: the cyclical movements that try to happen constantly in the verse, staging different spaces, that seem to be one, within a same time.
14- Quadrivium
As its name suggests, this essay of 1965, presents a division into four parts according to the poets to which it refers: Rubén Darío, Ramón López, Fernando Pessoa and Luis Cernuda, which carried out, according to the Mexican writer , Ruptures with respect to the poetry of his times.
Quadrivium Is an interesting bet on the rupture of modern poetry. A question that tries to be explored by Octavio Paz in his immersions towards the artistic and literary surrealism of the moment.
As a revolutionary author, not only in the political field but also poetic, Octavio Paz feels part of the tradition of the rupture to which these authors belong. In fact, the poet emphasizes in the prologue Quadrivium The following idea:"It is the tradition of our modern poetry. [...] a movement initiated at the end of the last century by the early Spanish-American modernists and which has not yet ended.
15- Poetry in motion: Mexico 1915- 1966
Published in 1966, this anthology of poetic authors, although without pretension to be, was reedited up to 30 times. The aim of this work was to be purely aesthetic, since it included young authors who favored avant-garde poetry, including Octavio Paz.
According to the critics, it is a book that changed the way of reading the lyrics in Mexico. It also covers topics that are fundamental to understanding Mexican culture from 1965 to 1970.
16- Claude-Levi-Strauss or Aesop's new feast
The theories of the anthropologist unleashed some of the most important works of Octavio Paz, as Labyrinth of solitude, Where the poet sought, among other things, to unravel some of the myths of the Mexican country.
The context of this book is placed under the Paris of the late sixties, where everything began to revolve around the idea of a code of signs that had to be deciphered; structuralism.
In homage to the father of this theory the poet writes the essay Claude-Levi-Strauss or Aesop's new feast In 1969 to honor the discoveries of the French ethnologist who supposed a visionary for Octavio Paz. The book is an open dialogue between the Mexican poet and the anthropological theories of his contemporary.
In this line, Octavio Paz writes works like Signs of rotation (1965), Conjunctions and disjunctions (1969), The sign and the scribble (1973) and The grammarian monkey (1974).
17- White
In 1967, White The light of an experimental halo of poetry and creativity that had been radiating for years in the writer. The poem, printed in a special edition that satisfied the extraordinary quality of the content, is an exponent of poetic renewal.
As the writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez explains, the text consists of a leaf that gradually"expands and, in a certain way, it unfolds, producing the text because space itself becomes text. The idea is that reading it becomes ritual, a journey with different possibilities [...]". As a curiosity, the poem can be read in up to six different combinations of reading.
The piece is an example of how, from nothing, there are infinite possibilities of creation and freedom. All existence is possible from an empty page.
18- Hillside
The experience of the Mexican writer's travels in India left in his later verses a profound imprint on subjects such as love. Especially harvested during his second stay in the Asian country for six years.
In this line is published East side In 1969 under the editorial of Joaquín Mortiz, a set of poems written between 1962 and 1968 that show the great change produced at the level of erotic poetry in the writer. The poems of this poemario stand out for their simple language, the naturalness of the images and the exoticism of the Orient.
19- Topoemas
This path of poetic inquiry in the new forms is kept in a straight line with the edition in the Revista de la Universidad de Mexico of six poems with the title of Tops In 1968. A topoema refers to those verses where the value of words occupy a semantic value.
The six poems are addressed to different friends and personalities of the circle of Octavio Paz and through them the poet experiences in the style of the calligrams of Apollinaire. Reading is predominantly visual, based on the parameters of concrete poetry and extending the reader's multi-faceted and interpretative character.
20- Visual Disks
The previous experimentation of White Y Tops Reaches its peak with Visual Disks , Published in 1969 by the painter Vicente Rojo who was in charge of the artistic realization of the work.
In this piece Octavio Paz continues betting by surrealistic poems of cuts and the concrete character of the previous poetry of Tops Y White. Like curiosity, the work consists of four discs that designed by Vicente Red, and read of nonlinear way, allow turning them taking to new fragments of the poems.
The edition is a commitment to imitate the reader to play with the work and to make him know of a type of poetic style that Octavio Paz will start to start: poetry in motion.
21- Naked appearance: the work of Marcel Duchamp
Among other figures for which Octavio Paz showed admiration was the surrealist painter Marcel Duchamp. His interest is such that in 1973 the Mexican poet published the essay Nude appearance: the work of Marcel Duchamp To applaud the ironic attitude of the artist and recognize in his most important pieces, Ready-mades , The key works of the 20th century.
Nevertheless, it is important to know that although the poet maintained close relations with the highest exponents of incipient surrealism, his literary style did not come under the parameters of that booming movement.
The contribution of Octavio Paz to surrealism was tangential and intellectual in reading deeply the works of its main authors and recognize the movement as few universal authors until then.
22- Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz or the traps of faith
This essay is an analysis on the life of the Spanish poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz presented at the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1982. It consists of three parts, which attempt to carry out, in the background, a historiographic portrait of the Spanish colonies during the Virreinal court
Octavio Paz wrote this book fascinated by the personality of this intellectual nun who wanted to indulge in ecclesiastical life to gain access to knowledge, reserved at that time to male power and before which he had to face.
For the poet, Sor Juana is the last poetess of the Spanish baroque, being visionary of modern poetry, idea with which the writer closes the last part of his book.
23- Complete Works
This work gathers in a single compendium the production of the writer from 1935 to 1998. It consists of two parts, the first tries to group his poems and books as important as Parole Where the poem referred to above is included: Sun stone .
In the second volume, we try to make an approximation to the work of Octavio Paz in his capacity as translator of poets around the world. With these Complete works , The author sentences from his foreword what will be the essence of his work: to turn"poetry into a second nature".
References
- Adolfo Castañón (2014): Transit of Octavio Paz (poems, notes, essays) . The school of Mexico. Mexico DF.
- Alberto Ruiy Sánchez (1990): An introduction to Octavio Paz. Editorial Joaquín Mortiz. Mexico.
- Alfredo A. Roggiano (1979): Octavio Paz , P. 57. Editorial Fundamentos, Madrid
- Anthony Stanton: The poetry of Octavio Paz during the Civil War in Spain, taken from Cvc.cervantes.es.
- Daniela Chazarreta: Between stone and flower: landscape, nature and culture in Octavio Paz , Extracted from critica.cl.
- Elena Poniatowska (1998): Octavio Paz. The words of the tree L. Lumen, Barcelona.
- José Francisco Conde: Octavio Paz: Eagle or sun? Extracted from uam.mx.
- Luisa M. Perdigó (1975): The aesthetics of Octavio Paz . Collection Nova Scholar Madrid,
- Yvon Grenier (2004): From art to politics. Octavio Paz and the search for freedom. Fund for Economic Culture, Mexico, D.F.