The work of Octavio Paz (1914-1998) is still as current as when it was published and is still the subject of analysis, discussion and reflection. His legacy lives on in the lucidity of his thought, which is projected intensely into the 21st century. It can be affirmed that “his legacy from him is not his word, but the space that his word opens”, as he himself wrote referring to Stéphane Mallarmé in his essay The signs in rotationfrom 1965.
The word and the poetics of Octavio Paz are a source of knowledge, without time or expiration. His life story stretches throughout the 20th century, a turbulent and disturbing century, full of conflicts, as well as paradigm shifts in knowledge that he was able to grasp and sometimes predict.
Investigate and argue, according to Octavio Paz
At the age of 23, Paz published “No pasarán”, an effusive poem in support of the second Spanish Republic. Thanks to that he was summoned by Pablo Neruda to participate in the II Congress of Antifascist Writers (Valencia, 1937).
Before an important group of left-wing writers (León Felipe, Cernuda, Alberti, Hemingway, Malraux, among others) he showed his enormous intellectual capacity and critical insight when he spoke about the value of freedom for the citizen and for the writer, when he defended freedom for the imagination. The experience was fundamental in his poetic and political trajectory. From then on he became a critical voice of the political situation in Mexico and the world.
He never stopped investigating and arguing about the excesses of totalitarian regimes during and after the Cold War. His critical vision becomes a “passion”. Both his poetry and his essays look at the history of Mexico, its evolution and its essence. He also highlights his anthropological interest, and for painting and avant-garde art.
In 1950 he published The Labyrinth of Solitude, an essay that strengthens its presence on the international scene due to its nature of exploration of “being Mexican”. The book unleashes controversy for its vision of loneliness and melancholy that imprison the being born from the encounter of two worlds.
According to the Mexican critic Christopher Domínguez Michael, author of an extensive and detailed biography of the poet entitled Octavio Paz in his century, “in just two years Paz established himself as one of the great writers of the Spanish-American world.” From 1956 to 1958 he published the poetic book The bow and the lyrethe collection of poems the violent stationand a remarkable long poem, “Piedra de Sol”.
In The bow and the lyre (1956), one of his capital books, explores the poetic phenomenon from practically all angles, in a dense and beautiful prose that flows like an inexhaustible spring. In the “Introduction” he writes:
“Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. Operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; spiritual exercise; it is a method of inner liberation. Poetry reveals this world, creates another. Bread of the elect; cursed food.”
The density of his prose is appreciated, but above all his ideas about the being of poetry, its constant oscillation between opposite poles, its dynamic nature, never petrified. His poetic meditations written in the mid-20th century do not have an expiration date.
The poem and the planet Venus
One of the highlights of his work is the poem “Piedra de sol” (1957). It consists of 584 hendecasyllables and, as the author himself explains, “the number of verses is equal to that of the synodic revolution of the planet Venus”, a representation of the feminine principle.
Paz bases his poetic composition on the Aztec calendar, in which the planet Venus was recorded to appear twice a day, the first as the morning star and the second as the evening star. In this calendar, the annual cycle begins on the 4th Ollin and, after 584 days, the 4th Ehécatl marks the conjunction of Venus and the Sun: the feminine and the masculine. In that conjunction a new cycle begins.
The poem unfolds in a dual key, an oxymoron, a meeting of opposites: feminine-masculine, good-evil, love-hate, life-death… a cosmic experience. It is circular in shape and begins and ends with the same six magnificent verses, like the serpent biting its tail in the Aztec calendar:
A glass willow, a poplar,
a tall fountain that the wind arches,
a well planted tree more dancing,
a river walk that curves,
advances, retreats, from a rodeo
and it always arrives:
The verses evoke a landscape in movement, trees, wind and river in harmony. In the body of the poem, great themes of Western poetry are addressed: the couple and the loving presence as a transcript of a “body of light”, the pilgrimage of men, women and their symbols, time, history, the life cycle .
trees and poetry
Octavo Paz always maintained an enormous attraction for nature, especially for trees, whose vital condition he compared to that of poetry:
“Trees make life breathable, in the physical sense, but also in the spiritual sense. And I think that poetry, like trees, also does that, it purifies language, it gives language a bit of oxygen, it allows us to speak in a better, deeper and more lucid way. Poetry and trees have a unique quality: they know how to burn. […] Poems and trees have to know how to burn”.
Twenty-five years after his death, Octavio Paz’s poetry continues to burn. Although we have reviewed very little of his life and work here (he wrote more than sixty books, gathered in fifteen volumes of Complete works), it becomes evident that he was a singular man, one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990 (being the only Mexican with that award).
In addition to being a writer, translator, and literature and art critic, Paz was an editor of world-class magazines. In them he published both established authors and young writers. The main ones were Plural y Vuelta. He was a promoter of culture, a man of memory, reflective, encyclopedic, passionate critic who broadened the cultural horizon of man and the world.
When asked in an interview at the end of his life how he would like to be remembered, without hesitation he expressed that as a poet.
And, rising above his other facets, this is how we remember him today: Octavio Paz, poet.
Dulce María Zúñiga Chávez, Research Professor of Literature, University of Guadalajara
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.
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