Octavio Paz

The Poems of Octavio Paz is the first retrospective collection of Paz’s poetry to span his entire writing career, from his first published poem, at age seventeen, to his magnificent last poem. This landmark bilingual edition contains many poems that have never been translated into English before, plus new translations based on Paz’s final revisions. Assiduously edited by Eliot Weinberger—who has been translating Paz for over forty years—The Poems of Octavio Paz also includes additional translations by the poet-luminaries Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson. Readers will also find Weinberger’s capsule biography of Paz, as well as illuminating notes on many poems in Paz’s own words taken from various interviews he gave throughout his long and singular life.

With additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson

Figures and Figurations, one of the last works completed by the great late Mexican poet Octavio Paz before his death in 1998, is a stunning collaborative project with his wife, the acclaimed artist Marie Jose Paz. In response to ten of her collage-constructions, he wrote ten new short poems; she in turn created two new artworks in response to two of his earlier poems. “These objects sometimes surprise us,” Paz writes, “and sometimes make us dream or laugh (humor is one of the poles of her work). Signs that invite us on a motionless voyage of fantasy, bridges to the indefinitely small or galactic distances, windows that open nowhere. Marie Jose’s art is a dialog between here and there.”

Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists “who drew their own maps of the world.” For Latin America’s foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center of a global mandala, a cultural configuration that, in his life and work, he has traced to its furthest reaches: to Spain, as a young Marxist during the Civil War; to San Francisco and New York in the early 1940s; to Paris, as a surrealist, in the postwar years; to India and Japan in 1952, and to the East again as his country’s ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968; and to various universities in the United States throughout the 1970s. A great synthesizer, the rich diversity of Paz’s thought is shown here in all its astonishing complexity. Among the sixty-seven selections in this volume, a gathering in English of his most essential poems drawn from nearly fifty years’ work, are Muriel Rukeyser’s now classic version of “Sun Stone” and new translations by editor Weinberger of “Blanco" and “Maithuna.” And since for Paz, forever in motion, there can be no such thing as a “definitive text,” all the poems have been revised to conform to the poet’s most recent changes in the original Spanish. Besides those by Rukeyser and Weinberger, the translations in the Selected Poems are by G. Aroul, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, William Carlos Williams, and Monique Fong Wust.

A Tale of Two Gardens collects the poetry from over 40 years of Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz’s many and various commitments to India––as Mexican ambassador, student of Indian philosophy, and above all, as poet. Despite having written many acclaimed non-fiction books on the region, he has always considered those writings to be footnotes to the poems. From the long work “Mutra,” written in 1952 and accompanied here by a new commentary by the author, to the celebrated poems of East Slope, and his recent adaptations from the classical Sanskrit, Paz scripts his India with a mixture of deft sensualism and hands-on politics. “No other Western poet has been as immersed in India as Paz,” writes Eliot Weinberger in his introduction. “More incredibly, perhaps not since Victor Segalen… has a Western poet been so expert on, experienced in, and written so extensively about, a cultural other. Our literary news of the world, for no reason, tends to come from novelists.” A Tale of Two Gardens presents a beautiful, complex, and utterly unclassifiable India, one only a poet such as Octavio Paz could know.

Nobel laureate Octavio Paz’s premier long poem Sunstone/Piedra de Sol is here printed as a separate volume, with beautiful illustrations from an eighteenth-century treatise on the Mexican calendar. Presented in Eliot Weinberger’s excellent new translation with the Spanish texts en face, this is the 1957 poem “that definitively established Paz as a major international figure” (Sagetrieb). 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 takes as its structural basis the circular Aztec calendar, which measured the synodic period of the planet Venus (584 days––the number of lines of Sunstone). But, as The New Republic noted, “this esoteric correlative design… does not circumscribe its subject. [It is] a lyrically discursive exploration of time and memory, of erotic love, of art and writing.”

Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz is incontestably Latin America’s foremost living poet. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz is a landmark bilingual gathering of all the poetry he has published in book form since 1957, the year of his premier long poem_, Sunstone (Piedra de Sol)–_–here translated anew by Eliot Weinberger––made its appearance. This is followed by the complete texts of Days and Occasions (Días Hábiles), Homage and Desecrations (Homenaje y Profanaciones), Salamander (Salamandra), Solo for Two Voices (Solo a Dos Voces), East Slope (Ladera Este), Toward the Beginning (Hacia el Comienzo), Blanco, Topoems (Topoemas), Return (Vuelta), A Draft of Shadows (Pasado en Claro), Airborn (Hijos del Aire), and Paz’s most recent collection, A Tree Within (Arbol Adentro).

A Tree Within (Arbol Adentro), the first collection of new poems by the great Mexican author Octavio Paz since his Return (Vuelta) of 1975, was originally published as the final section of The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987. Among these later poems is a series of works dedicated to such artists as Miró, Balthus, Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Tapies, Alechinsky, Monet, and Matta, as well as a number of epigrammatic and Chinese-like lyrics. Two remarkable long poems ––“I Speak of the City,” a Whitmanesque apocalyptic evocation of the contemporary urban nightmare, and “Letter of Testimony,” a meditation on love and death––are emblematic of the mature poet in a prophetic voice.

A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems is the most recent collection of the work of Mexico’s leading poet and essayist, Octavio Paz. The first section of poems, from Ladera este (East Slope, 1969), reflects some of Paz’s experiences as his country’s ambassador to India (1962-68). Following stays in England, France, and the United States, he returned to Mexico in 1971, reacting to the urban sprawl and violence of Mexico City with the four long poems of disaster and rage that, together with shorter poems more familiar in tone, make up Vuelta (“Return_,"_ 1976). A long meditation on the poet’s childhood and adolescence, Pasado en claro (“A Draft of Shadows,” 1975) forms the third section of this volume and represents a further departure from the self-contained surreal images many associate with Paz. This bilingual selection concludes with a sampling of his most recent lyrics, and the promise of further experimentation. Paz, winner in 1981 of both the Neustadt Prize and the Cervantes Award, stated in a recent interview: “When I am writing a poem, it is to make something, an object or organism that will be whole and living, something that will have a life independent of me,” and throughout this book the poet’s abiding concern for language as a living force is revealed. For Paz, poetry is a way of reinventing the self, and appropriately, the reflective. “A Draft of Shadows” concludes: “I am the shadow my words cast.”

The first major book of short prose poetry in Spanish, Eagle or Sun? (Aguila o Sol?) exerted an enormous influence on modern Latin American writing. Written in 1949-50 by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun? has as its mythopoeic “place” Mexico––a country caught up in its pre-Columbian past, the world of modern imperialism, and an apocalyptic future foretold by the Aztec calendar. Indeed, three personae of the book–the goddess Itzapaplotl, the prophet clerk, the poet––are manifestations of the threefold aspects of the land. Paz himself explains: “Eagle or Sun? is an exploration of Mexico, yes, but at the same time, and above all, it is an exploration of the relations between language and the poet, reality and language, the poet and history.”

“The growth of the work of Octavio Paz,” writes Muriel Rukeyser in her preface to this bilingual selection of the Mexican poet’s Early Poems, “has made clear to an audience in many languages what was evident from the beginning … he is a great poet, a world-poet whom we need. The poems here speak––as does all his work since––deeply, erotically, with grave and passionate involvement.” In this, a much revised edition of the earlier Selected Poems (Indiana University Press, 1963), Miss Rukeyser has joined to her own translations those of Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams, while many of the readings embody Paz’s own revisions of the original texts. The poems were chosen from eight separate collections, among them Condición de nube (“Phase of Cloud”), Semillas para un himno (“Seeds for a Psalm”), Piedras sueltas (“Riprap”), and Estación violenta (“Violent Season”).

Octavio Paz, the 1990 Nobel Laureate, has won distinction as an anthropologist, philosopher and critic of art and literature. But it is as a poet that he is most celebrated. Configurations was his first major collection to be published in this country, and includes in their entirety Sun Stone (1957) and Blanco (1967). Paz himself translated many of the poems from the Spanish. Some distinguished contributors to this bilingual edition include, among others, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp. Denise Levertov, and Muriel Rukeyser. Paz’s poems, although rooted in the mythology of South America and his native Mexico, nevertheless have an international background, transfiguring the images of the contemporary world. Powerful, angry, erotic, they voice the desires and rage of a generation.