| 奥克塔维奥·帕斯 | |||||
| Birth Place： | 墨西哥城 | ||||
| Death Place： | 墨西哥城 | ||||
Read works of Octavio Paz Lozano at 诗海 | |||||
帕斯Paz was born to Octavio Paz Solórzano and Josefina Lozano. His father was an active supporter of the Revolution against the Diaz regime. Paz was raised in the village of Mixcoac (now a part of Mexico City) by his mother Josefina, his aunt Amalia Paz, and his paternal grandfather, Ireneo Paz, a liberal intellectual, novelist, publisher and former supporter of President Porfirio Díaz. Because of his family's public support of Emiliano Zapata they were forced into exile after Zapata's assassination. They served their exile in the United States.
Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather's library, filled with classic Mexican and European literature
. During the 1920s, he discovered the European poets Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Antonio Machado, Spanish writers who had a great influence on his early writing
. As a teenager in 1931, under the influence of D. H. Lawrence, Paz published his first poems, like Caballera. Two years later, at the age of 19, Octavio Paz published Luna Silvestre ("Wild Moon"), a collection of poems. In 1932, with some friends, he founded his first literary review, Barandal. By 1939, Paz considered himself first and foremost a poet
.
In 1937, Paz abandoned his law studies and left for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida for sons of peasants and worker
. There, he began working on the first of his long ambitious poems, Entre la piedra y la flor ("Between the stone and the flower") (1941, revised in 1976), obviously influenced by T. S. Eliot, which describes the situation of the Mexican peasant under the greedy landlords of the day.
In 1937, Paz was invited to the Second International Writers Congress in Defense of Culture in Spain during the country's Civil War, showing his solidarity with the Republican side and against fascism. Upon his return to Mexico, Paz co-founded a literary journal, Taller ("Workshop") in 1938, and wrote for the magazine until 1941. In 1938 he also met and married Elena Garro, now considered one of Mexico's finest writers. They had one daughter, Helena. They were divorced in 1959. In 1943 Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship and began studying at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States and two years later he entered the Mexican diplomatic service, working in New York for a while. In 1945 he was sent to Paris, where he wrote El Laberinto de la Soledad ("The Labyrinth of Solitude"), a groundbreaking study of Mexican identity and thought. In 1952 he travelled to India for the first time and, in the same year, to Tokyo, as chargé d'affairs, and then to Geneva, in Switzerland. He returned to Mexico City in 1954, where he wrote his great poem Piedra de sol (Sunstone) in 1957 and Libertad bajo palabra (Liberty Under Oath), a compilation of his poetry up to that time. He was sent again to Paris in 1959, following the steps of his lover, the Italian painter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis. In 1962 he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.
Octavio Paz’s route was his own, not mine, but behind that route a path is traceable, and in that path I recognize an invaluable lesson: society and solitude—how to make these two compatible? His answer was to live life in full, alone and with others. To make oneself present by tracing one’s past and betting on the future.
Ilan Stavans
Later life
In India, Paz completed several works, including El mono gramático (The Monkey Grammarian) and Ladera este (Eastern Slope). In 1965 he broke up with Bona and married Marie-José Tramini, a French woman who would be his wife to the end of his days. In October 1968, he resigned from the diplomatic corps in protest of the Mexican government's repression of students who were fighting to achieve true democracy in the country, a movement that ended abruptly when the army opened fire against demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco. He sought refuge in Paris for a while and returned to Mexico in 1969, where he founded his magazine Plural (1970-1976) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers. From 1970 to 1974 he lectured at Harvard University in Cambridge, where he held the Charles Norton Chair. His book Los hijos del limo ("Children of the Mire") was the result of those courses. After the government closed Plural in 1975, Paz founded Vuelta, a publication with a focus similar to that of Plural and continued editing that magazine until his death. He won the 1977 Jerusalem Prize for literature on the theme of individual freedom. In 1980 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and in 1982 he won the Neustadt Prize. A collection of his poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1988. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.". In India he met the Hungryalist poets and was of immense help to them during their 35 month long trial.
He died of cancer in 1998. In his 2003 essay on Paz, Ilan Stavans wrote that he was “the quintessential surveyor, a Dante's Virgil, a Renaissance man”. Guillermo Sheridan, who was named by Paz as director of the Octavio Paz Foundation in 1998, published a book, Poeta con Paisaje (2004) with several biographical essays about the poet's life until 1968.
Writing
A prolific author and poet, Paz published scores of works during his lifetime, many of which are translated into other languages. His poetry, for example, has been translated into English by Samuel Beckett, Charles Tomlinson, Elizabeth Bishop and Mark Strand. His early poetry was influenced by Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, as well as religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. His poem, Piedra de Sol ("Sunstone") written in 1957, was praised as a "magnificent" example of surrealist poetry in the presentation speech of his Nobel Prize. His later poetry dealt with love and eroticism, the nature of time, and buddhism. He also wrote poetry about his other passion, modern painting, dedicating poems to the work of Balthus, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. Several of his poems have also been adapted into choral music by composer Eric Whitacre, including "Water Night," "Cloudburst," and "A Boy and a Girl."
As an essayist Paz wrote on topics like Mexican politics and economics, Aztec art, anthropology, and sexuality. His book-length essay, The Labyrinth of Solitude (Spanish: El laberinto de la soledad), delves into the minds of his countrymen, describing them as hidden behind masks of solitude. Due to their history, their identity is lost between a precolombian and a Spanish culture, negating either. A key work in understanding Mexican culture, it greatly influenced other Mexican writers, such as Carlos Fuentes.
After a tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Paz wrote the play, La hija de Rappaccini (1956), a lyrical tale of love, death and the loss of innocence. The plot centers around a young Italian student who wonders about the beautiful gardens and even more beautiful daughter (Beatrice) of the mysterious Professor Rappaccini. He is horrified when he discovers the poisonous nature of their beauty. Paz adapted the play from the eponymous 1844 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, combining it with sources from the Indian poet [Vishakadatta]. Paz also cited influences from Japanese Noh theatre, the Spanish auto sacramental and the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Its opening performance was designed by the Mexican painter Leonora Carrington. First performed in English in 1996 at the Gate Theatre in London, the play was translated and directed by Sebastian Doggart and starred Sarah Alexander as Beatrice. In 1972, Surrealist author André Pieyre de Mandiargues translated the play into French as La fille de Rappaccini (Editions Mercure de France). Mexican composer Daniel Catán turned the play into an opera in 1992.
Paz's other works translated into English include volumes of essays, some of the more prominent of which are: Alternating Current (tr. 1973), Configurations (tr. 1971), The Labyrinth of Solitude (tr. 1963), The Other Mexico (tr. 1972); and El Arco y la Lira (1956; tr. The Bow and the Lyre, 1973). Along with these are volumes of critical studies and biographies, including Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Duchamp (both, tr. 1970) and The Traps of Faith, an analytical biography of the Mexican 16th century nun, poet and thinker Sor Juana de la Cruz.
His works include the poetry collections La Estación Violenta, (1956), Piedra de Sol (1957), and in English translation the most prominent include two volumes which include most of Paz in English: Early Poems: 1935–1955 (tr. 1974), and Collected Poems, 1957–1987 (1987). Many of these volumes have been edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, who is Paz's principal translator into American English.
Disillusioned with communism
Originally Paz showed his solidarity with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, but after learning of the murder of one of his comrades by the Republicans themselves he became gradually disillusioned. While in Paris in the early fifties, influenced by David Rousset, André Breton and Albert Camus, he started publishing his critical views on totalitarianism in general, and against Stalin in particular.
Later, in both Plural and Vuelta, Paz exposed the violations of human rights in the Stalinist regimes. This brought him much animosity from the Latin American left and some university students. In the Prologue of the IX volume of his completed works, Paz stated that from the time when he abandoned communist dogma, the mistrust of many in the Mexican intelligentsia started to transform into an intense and open enmity; he did not suspect that the vituperation would follow him for decades.
There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.
Octavio Paz
In 1990, during the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin wall, Paz and his Vuelta colleagues invited several of the world’s writers and intellectuals to Mexico City to discuss the collapse of communism, including Czeslaw Milosz, Hugh Thomas, Daniel Bell, Ágnes Heller, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jean-Francois Revel, Michael Ignatieff, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Edwards and Carlos Franqui. The Vuelta encounter was broadcast on Mexican television from 27 August to 2 September.
Further reading
English
The writing in the stars: a jungian reading of the poetry of Octavio Paz / Rodney Williamson., 2007
Octavio Paz / Nick Caistor., 2006
The philosophy of yoga in Octavio Paz's poem Blanco / Richard J Callan., 2005
Shipwreck and deliverance: politics, culture and modernity in the works of Octavio Paz / Todd Lutes., 2003
Poetry criticism (Gale Group): volume 48 / David Galens., 2003
Octavio Paz (Modern Critical Views) / Bloom, Harold., 2002
Octavio Paz: a meditation / Stavans, Ilan., 2001
Tribute to Octavio Paz / Mexican Cultural Institute of New York., 2001
From art to politics: Octavio Paz and the pursuit of freedom / Grenier, Yvon., 2001
Understanding Octavio Paz / Quiroga, Jose., 1999
The critical poem: Borges, Paz, and other language-centered poets in Latin America / Running, Thorpe., 1996
Octavio Paz and the language of poetry: a psycholinguistic approach / Underwood, Leticia Iliana., 1992
Orientalism in the Hispanic literary tradition: in dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy / Kushigian, Julia., 1991
Octavio Paz, the mythic dimension / Chiles, Frances., 1987
Toward Octavio Paz: a reading of his major poems, 1957-1976 / Fein, John M., 1986
Octavio Paz (Twayne's World Authors Series) / Wilson, Jason., 1986
Two essays on Latin American political myths: Octavio Paz and Che Guevara / James Wallace Wilkie., 1981
Octavio Paz, homage to the poet / Chantikian, Kosrof., 1980
Octavio Paz, a study of his poetics / Wilson, Jason., 1979
Aspects of surrealism in the work of Octavio Paz / José Gabriel Sánchez., 1976
Octavio Paz: critic of modern Mexican poetry / Phillips, Allen Whitmarsh., 1973
The universalism of Octavio Paz / Gullón, Ricardo., 1973
Octavio Paz: or the revolution in search of an actor / George Gordon Wing., 1973
The perpetual present; the poetry and prose of Octavio Paz / Ivar Ivask., 1973
The poetic modes of Octavio Paz / Rachel Phillips., 1972
Mexico as theme, image, and contribution to myth in the poetry of Octavio Paz / Judith Ann Bernard., 1964
Octavio Paz poetry, politics, and the myth of the Mexican / George Gordon Wing., 1961
Spanish
Octavio Paz en los debates críticos y estéticos del siglo XX / Clara Román-Odio., 2006
Octavio Paz: la dimensión estética del ensayo / Héctor Jaimes., 2004
Espiral de luz: tiempo y amor en Piedra de sol de Octavio Paz / Dante Salgado., 2003
Octavio Paz y la poética de la historia mexicana / D A Brading., 2002
Camino de ecos: introducción a las ideas políticas de Octavio Paz / Dante Salgado., 2002
Octavio Paz: una visión de la poesía de occidente: hermenéutica y horizonte simbólico / Marta Santibáñez., 2002
Las primeras voces del poeta Octavio Paz, 1931-1938 / Anthony Stanton., 2001
Homenaje a Octavio Paz. / Mexican Cultural Institute., 2001
El árbol milenario: un recorrido por la obra de Octavio Paz / Manuel Ulacia., 1999
Author, autoridad y autorización: escritura y poética de Octavio Paz / Rubén Medina., 1999
Tránsito poético e intellectual de Octavio Paz / Abelardo M García Viera., 1999
Dos grandes latinoamericanos / Karla I Herrera., 1999
El acto de las palabras: estudios y diálogos con Octavio Paz / Enrico Mario Santí., 1997
Volver al ser: un acercamiento a la poética de Octavio Paz / Mario Pinho., 1997
Octavio Paz: viajero del presente / Roberto Hozven., 1994
Octavio Paz en sus "Obras completas" / Adolfo Castañón., 1994
Festejo: 80 años de Octavio Paz / Adolfo Castañón., 1994
Octavio Paz: poética e identidad / Fidel Sepúlveda Llanos., 1993
Octavio Paz: el espejo roto / Roland Forgues., 1992
Octavio Paz: poética del hombre / Rafael Jiménez Cataño., 1992
Octavio Paz: trayectorias y visiones / Maya Schärer-Nussberger., 1989
El elemento oriental en la poesía de Octavio Paz / Jung Kim Kwon Tae., 1989
El cuerpo y la letra: la cosmologia poetica de Octavio Paz / Javier Gonzalez., 1988
Polaridad-unidad, caminos hacia Octavio Paz / Margarita Murillo González., 1987
La cabeza rota: la poética de Octavio Paz / Jorge Arturo Ojeda., 1983
El arte combinatoria en los poemas de Octavio Paz." El Nacional t. Caracas./ Consuelo Hernández. September 25. 1982
Signos en rotación, una teoría poética." El Nacional. Caracas,/Consuelo Hernández. October 2, l982.
Octavio Paz / Pere Gimferrer., 1982
Lecturas de Octavio Paz / Pere Gimferrer., 1980
Variables poéticas de Octavio Paz / Diego Martínez Torrón., 1979
Octavio Paz / Alfredo A Roggiano., 1979
Reinvención de la palabra: la obra poética de Octavio Paz / Eusebio Rojas Guzmán., 1979
La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz / Carlos Horacio Magis., 1978
Poesía y conocimiento: Borges, Lezama Lima, Octavio Paz / Ramón Xirau., 1978
La divina pareja: historia y mito: valoración e interpretación de la obra ensayística de Octavio Paz / Jorge Mora., 1978
Octavio Paz, poesía y poética / Monique J Lemaître., 1976
Las estaciones poéticas de Octavio Paz / Rachel Phillips., 1976
Homenaje a Octavio Paz / Juan Valencia., 1976
Octavio Paz / Jorge Rodríguez Padrón., 1975
Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz: un simposio / Angel Flores., 1974
Acerca de Octavio Paz / Guillermo Sucre., 1974
Award
Nobel Prize for Literature
Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
Cervantes Prize
National Literature Prize (Mexico)
Premio Mondello (Palermo, Italy)
Alfonso Reyes Prize
Neustadt International Prize for Literature
Jerusalem Prize
Menendez y Pelayo Prize
Alexis de Tocqueville Prize
Xavier Villaurrutia Award
Doctor Honoris Causa (Harvard)
Doctor Honoris Causa (National Autonomous University of Mexico)