Joel Whitney - Poetry and Action: Octavio Paz at 100

The poet who coined “No Pasaran” - “They Will Not Pass”

Born: March 31, 1914, Mexico City, Mexico

Died: April 19, 1998, Mexico City, Mexico
Nobel Prize in Literature 1990

Paz cited Chateaubriand: “The Revolution would have carried me along . . . but I saw the first head paraded on the end of a pike, and I recoiled. I shall never look on murder as an argument in favor of liberty. I know of nothing more servile, more cowardly, more obtuse than a terrorist. Did I not find, later on, that entire race of Brutuses in the service of Caesar and his police?”

SUNSTONE is the 1957 poem "that definitively established Paz as a major international figure". Written as a single cyclical sentence (at the end of the poem the first six lines are written again), Sunstone is a tour de force of momentum. 

It was the fiftieth anniversary of the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. He recalled the controversy that was caused by Andre Gide’s 1937 report on the abuses and corruptions of power that had occurred under Stalin. The report made Gide a pariah on the literary left. When members of the Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers moved to censure Gide, Paz voted against it, but he didn’t speak out. At the fiftieth anniversary commemoration, Paz felt the need to confess. Though the censure was eventually vetoed by Andre Malraux, and Paz had been courageous to vote against it in the minority, he nevertheless regretted his behavior as a failure of the principle of fraternity. "Although many of us were convinced of the injustice of those attacks and we admired Gide, we kept silent," he said. "And so we contributed to the petrification of the revolution.” My favorite poem in all of Paz’s oeuvre comes from that period of public repentance. One of his shortest, the poem indicates an awe in the face of our impotence, our smallness, our certain annihilation. It’s called “Brotherhood.”

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
The stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out

 When protest movements spread through cities around the world in 1968, Octavio Paz looked upon the “great youth rebellions . . . from afar,” he wrote, “with astonishment and with hope.” The poet was then Mexico’s ambassador to India. He escaped the summer heat of New Delhi into the foothills of the Himalayas, following developments on the radio. Soon, he learned that Mexico had joined the rebellions. Mexico would host the Olympics in October. As protests grew entrenched, and students threatened to disrupt the games, government repression intensified. On October 2, hundreds of student protesters were killed at Mexico’s City’s Tlatelolco Plaza. Hearing the grim news, Ambassador Paz’s response was a swift vote of no confidence, a letter of unambiguous dissent. It was, as he described the rebellions themselves, the merging of poetry and action, a merger he constantly craved.

Paz was poetry’s great universalist. Winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, he absorbed many of the great movements of the twentieth century: Marxism, surrealism, the European avant garde. Early in the Spanish Civil War, he tried his hand at social realism, and he admired North American poetry, especially Whitman, Pound, Eliot, and Williams. His ambassadorship to India in the 1960s introduced him to the pillars of Hindu and Buddhist thought.

In 2012, in anticipation of the fifteenth anniversary of his death, New Directions brought outThe Poems of Octavio Paz. All but ignored since publication, The Poems deserve attention, because—in addition to being frequently masterful, and impressively translated into English—they represent hybridity, universality, and an aesthetic and political middle way. As we approach Paz’s 100th birthday later this month, it’s worth looking again at the life and work of a man unfairly maligned as an apologist for the right during the final decade of the Cold War.

2. Born in 1914, Paz was raised in Mixcoac, today a part of Mexico City. He grew up in a house he described as disintegrating: Our family had been impoverished by the revolution and the civil war. Our house, full of antique furniture, books, and other objects, was gradually crumbling to bits. As rooms collapsed we moved the furniture into another. I remember that for a long time I lived in a spacious room with part of one of the walls missing. Some magnificent screens protected me inadequately from the wind and rain.

At seventeen, he published his first poem, “Game.” Two years later came his first book, Luna Silvestre. Also at a young age, he witnessed the first incident in what became one of his lifelong obsessions: political repression. It was late in the Mexican revolution, when Paz and his mother were traveling to meet his father, a political journalist and lawyer for Emiliano Zapata. They were traveling by train, under armed protection, to visit the elder Paz, who was exiled in San Antonio, Texas, when suddenly Paz’s mother covered his eyes. This had the ironic effect of waking him, while failing to shield him from the grim sight outside the train. “I saw an elongated shadow hanging from a pole.” He was six.

At the invitation of Pablo Neruda, Paz traveled to Valencia, Spain in 1937 to join the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. He spent a year there before going to Paris, where he advocated for the Spanish Republic. He met poets W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Antonio Machado, Tristan Tzara, and of course Neruda. The civil war steered his poetry into a short-lived social realist mode, perhaps his first attempt to join words and action.

“Elegy for a Friend Dead at the Front in Aragon” and “Ode to Spain” stand out as examples of this effort; the former addresses Paz’s “comrade” and finds brief moments of felicity in the psychology of grief and loss, asking, “What fields will grow that you won’t harvest? / What blood will run without your heirs? / What word will we say that doesn’t say / your name, your silence, / the quiet pain of not having you?” Paz also became known for “No Pasaran,” or “They Will Not Pass,” a call to arms in verse that caused a minor sensation.

Upon his return to Mexico City, he launched a magazine of new Mexican poetry named Taller (Workshop). Ambivalent about the European avant-garde, Paz’s opening manifesto cited copiously the Spanish perspectivist philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset, declaring that the purpose of the magazine was “to be not the place where a generation is erased but the place where the Mexican is being made and is rescued from injustice, from a lack of culture, from frivolity and death.”

During the Second World War, Mexico became a haven for displaced Europeans; amid the capital’s newfound cosmopolitanism, Paz met refugees like Victor Serge. He also edited a massive anthology that brought together Spanish-language writers in a controversial way: he allowed political opponents to sit alongside one another in its pages. What his most important translator, Eliot Weinberger, calls his “first substantial collection” of poems, On the Bank of the World, appeared in 1942; in one poem in the book, he wrote, “He wanted to sing, to sing / to forget / his true life of lies / and to remember / his lying life of truths.”

After the war Paz took a low-level post in the Mexican foreign service in Paris, where he met Andre Breton and Albert Camus; there he fell in love with the streets, and his encounter with surrealism deepened. Paz’s lifelong meditation on poetry and words doing something now led him to abandon realism in favor of more experimental verse. “I should say that I write as if in a silent dialogue with Breton,” Paz once admitted. In an introduction to his work, Michael Schmidt amplifies this sentiment: “Under Breton’s influence, Paz tried automatic writing and produced his great prose-poems. But it’s interesting that in his valedictory essay on Breton, Paz quotes none of his master’s poetry, only his critical statements.”

Being abroad also helped clarify his understanding of his native Mexico. “Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition,” he wrote in Labyrinth of Solitude, his book-length essay deciphering the Mexican character... read more:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/poetry-and-action-octavio-paz-at-100

SUNSTONE

willow of crystal, a poplar of water,

a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over, 

tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, 

turning course of a river that goes curving,

advances and retreats, goes roundabout, 

arriving forever..

http://www.mysterium.com/sunstone.html