Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.




Octavio Paz - Biography Information/Research
Jared Broddle







http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.



http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC;jsessionid=1EF8DC6A0060370020185005CF2FD443?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=olat49773&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13029769&n=10&docNum=H1000076804&ST=octavio+paz&bConts=16047

Octavio Paz

1914-1998

Entry Updated : 02/19/2002 
Ethnicity:  Hispanic 
Birth Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Death Place:  Mexico City, Mexico 
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of cancer, April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico; son of Octavio Paz (a lawyer) and Josephina Lozano; married Elena Garro (a writer), mid-1930s (marriage ended, mid-1950s); married Marie Jose Tramini, 1964; children: one daughter. Education: Attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1932-37. Politics: "Disillusioned leftist." Religion: Atheist. Memberships: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary). 

Career: Writer. Government of Mexico, Mexican Foreign Service, posted to San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, secretary at Mexican Embassy in Paris, beginning 1945, charge d'affaires at Mexican Embassy in Japan, beginning 1951, posted to Mexican Secretariat for External Affairs, 1953-58, extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister to Mexican Embassy, 1959-62, ambassador to India, 1962-68. Visiting professor of Spanish-American literature, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pittsburgh, 1968-70; Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, 1970, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1970-71; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 1971-72; Professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, 1973-80. Regent's fellow at University of California, San Diego. 

Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1944; Grand Prix International de Poesie (Belgium), 1963; Jerusalem Prize, Critics Prize (Spain), and National Prize for Letters (Mexico), all 1977; Grand Aigle d'Or (Nice, France), 1979; Premio Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico), 1980; Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), 1982; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1982; Wilhelm Heinse Medal (West Germany), 1984; German Book Trade Peace prize, 1984; T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1987; Tocqueville Prize, 1989; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1990. 



http://www.litweb.net/biography/218/Octavio_Paz.html

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is the experimental PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), about the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore. The poems were based on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love.

"I travel your length
like a river
I travel your body
like a forest."
(from 'Piedra de sol')

Paz's poetry and prose combines opposites, passion and reason, society and individual, word and meaning. From the 1940's the influence of surrealism is seen in his works; he had already met André Breton in Mexico in the 1930s. Paz's first book of poems, LUNA SILVESTRE, appeared in 1933. The work contained haunting pictures of Mexico's past and future and it has not been reprinted.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, into a family of mostly Spanish but part-Indian descent. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary for Emilio Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family went into exile for a short time in the United States. After returning to Mexico Paz studied law and literature at the National University of Mexico, but he refused to take his degree. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write poems, and made his breakthrough in the 1930s. In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz went to Spain and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, among others, were recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). By the time the Cold War began, Paz had rejected the Marxist left, and found the meaning of poetry in its transgressive quality and from its visionary powers.

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. In the beginning of the 1940s Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He continued his career as a diplomat in Paris, Japan, the United States, and India (1962-68), also serving as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. In 1969 Paz moved back to Mexico and started to explore his childhood and youth in his poetry. Autobiographical details were used in VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975).

"Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable
To learn to see
Your glance scatters seeds
It planted a tree
I talk
because you shake its leaves."
(from 'Coda')

From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania. He was Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970), Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was the editor of Plural and Vuelta. In 1982 Paz won the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

Since 1933 Paz has published some 30 volumes. His collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. His works shows the influence of Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by Joan Miró, Marcer Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta .The Central themes: history, violence, lies and truth, corruption and revolution, reflect the reality of Latin American and its literature. The word is situated at the centre of Paz's poems. Language is never set free as in Surrealism, but maintains a formal coherence. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz broke with the traditional presentation of poetry and used some of the typical innovations of French Cubism.

As an essayist Paz has dealt with Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is his most influential interpretations of Mexican character, which according to the author does not know who he is and is suspicious of others because he is suspicious of himself. LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explored the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relations to culture. Although Paz was known as supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993).

Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry includes EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (1956, The Bow and the Lyre), LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974, Children of the Mire), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968), which provide insights into contemporary hermetic expression.

Todo nos amenaza:
el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide
al que fui
del que seré,
como el machete a la culebra;
la transparencia traspasada,
la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;
las palabras, la tela agujereada del espíritu;
nuestros nombres, que entre tú y yo se levantan,
murallas de vacío que ninguna trompeta derrumba.
(from 'Más allá del amor')

For further reading: The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz by Rachel Phillips (1972); Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Flores (1974); La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz by C.H. Magis (1978); La divina pareja by Jorge Aguilar Mora (1978); Octavio Paz, ed. by A. Roggiano (1979), Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics by J. Wilson (1979); Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by K. Chantikian (1981); Octavio Paz by Jason Wilson (1986); Octavio Paz by John M. Fein (1986); Una intraduccción a Octavio Paz by Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1990) Biografía política de Octavio Paz by Fernando Vizcaíno (1993); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3) - Note: Paz founded the highly esteemed magazine Vuelta in 1976. Its last volume appeared in 1998, but the magazine is continuing under another title.



http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/opaz.htm

Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz's poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented with the form. Among his most famous poems is PIEDRA DE SOL (1957, Sun Stone), referring to the planet Venus, a symbol of sun and water in Aztec folklore; Goddess of love in Western mythology. The poems were modelled on the famous Aztec calendar stone. It starts with the same lines with which it ends, and unites in the first part nature and love. 

"I travel your length 
like a river 
I travel your body 
like a forest." 
(from 'Piedra de sol') 
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather was a novelist and his father worked as a secretary to Emiliano Zapata. When Zapata was driven into retreat and assassinated, the family lived in exile in the United States for a short time. After the return to Mexico, Paz studied law and literature at the National University, but refused to take his degree. However, from his youth Paz's ambition was to be a poet. Encouraged by Pablo Neruda, Paz started to write. From 1933 he published over 40 books. Paz's first collection was LUNA SILVESTRE (1933). 

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro; they divorced in 1959. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited Spain, and fought on the Republican side. His experiences in Spain, where he met among others André Malraux, André Gide, and Ilja Ehrenburg, Paz recorded in the collection BAJO TU CLARA SOMBRA Y OTROS POEMAS (1937). The leftist overtones of his poetry were temporary, but he remained unyielding in his defence of freedom of expression and democracy. From the 1940s he started to use Surrealistic images; he had met André Breton already in Mexico in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. However, Paz's expression was never uncontrolled. "Poetry lets us touch the impalpable," he wrote in The Double Flame (1993), "and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia." 

Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion," Paz once said. With this attitude he departed from such leading Latin American writers as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, both sharp political critics. Neruda never abandoned his faith in Communism and García Marquez defended the Cuban Revolution. Paz often warned about Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America and his friendship with Gabriel García Marquez and Neruda partly fell apart because of different political views. In 1976 Paz wrote: "Between what I see and what I say / Between what I say and what I keep silent / Between what I keep silent and what I dream / Between what I dream and what I forget: / Poetry". Paz's has called writers the "guardians of language." 

In the late 1930s and in the 1940s Paz worked as a journalist. He founded and edited several important literary reviews, including Taller (1938-41) and El hijo pródigo. At the beginning of the 1940s, Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel and studies at the University of Berkley. After WW II he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps. He spent six years in Paris. "My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them," he later wrote in VISLUMBRES DE LA INDIA (1995). He was devastated to leave his friends and the city, but continued his career in Japan, the United States, and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest over the massacre of students at Plaza Tlateloco in Mexico City in October, before the Olympic Games. Paz moved back to Mexico in 1969 and started in his poetry to explore his childhood and youth. In VUELTA (1976) and PASADO EN CLARO (1975) he used autobiographical material. In 'San Ildefonso Nocturne' Paz looked ironically into the past and asked what has happened to those who wanted to "set the world right." 

The boy who walks through this poem, 
between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo, 
is the man who writes it: 
----- this page too 
is a ramble through the night. 
(from 'San Ildefonso Nocturne') 
From 1968 to 1970 Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies (1970) and Fellow of Churchill College (1970-71), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge (1971-72). From 1971-76 Paz was editor of the Plural, and from 1976 he edited the Vuelta. In 1982 he won the prestigious Neustadt Prize. Paz's collected poems (1957-87), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. Octavio Paz died at the age of 84 on April 19, 1998. 

Paz had early adopted influences from Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, French and Anglo-American modernism. However, by the time of the Nobel prize, he had become a conservative; he also defended the contra wars in Nicaragua. Many of Paz's later poems are based on paintings by such artists as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. In SALAMANDRA (1962) Paz used innovations of French Cubism. His writing often dealt with opposites, passion and reason, society and the individual, word and meaning. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities," Paz wrote in The Double Flame. 

As an essayist Paz dealt with such issues as Aztec art, Tantric Buddhism, Mexican politics, neo-platonic philosophy, economic reform, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, sexuality and eroticism. EL LABERINTO DE LA SOLEDAD (1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered one of the most influential studies of life, Mexican character and thought. In Los Angeles Paz noted, that although Mexicans in the streets wear the same clothes and speak the same language as the other inhabitants, they feel ashamed of their origin. "What distinguishes them, I think, is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger's look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked." According to the author, his countrymen are instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude. They do not know who they are and they are suspicious of others because they are suspicious of themselves. The book-length essay from a psycho-mythic perspective deeply influenced Mexican writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes. 

LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (1974) explores the history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avant-garde. Paz's distaste for the materialism of the Western democracies is seen in CORRIENTE ALTERNA (1967). Also in Children of the Mire (1974) he argues that "the tendency to identify the modern age with civilization, and both with the West, has become so widespread that many people in Latin America talk about our cultural underdevelopment." POSDATA (1970) was an interpretation of the failures of Mexico's political system and its relation to culture. Although Paz was known as a supporter of the neo-liberal economic policies, he criticized the weakness of liberal democracy in TIEMPO NUBLADO (1983), LA OTRA VOZ (1990) and ITINERARIO (1993). Paz's numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry include EL ARCO Y LA LIRA (The Bow and the Lyre 1956) , LOS HIJOS DEL LIMO (Children of the Mire 1974), and MARCEL DUCHAMP (1968). In Essays on Mexican Art (1993) Paz dealt with pre-Columbian art, its "otherness" manifested in massive blocks of carved stone. He also contemplated on the secret of Rufino Tamayo's paintings, and examined critically Frieda Kahlo's self-portraits. "The true artist is the one who says no even when he says yes," Paz once wrote. 



http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/authorbios/index2.jsp?author=13mistralborgesnerudapazcort225zarm225rquezvalenzuelaandallende

Octavio Paz

(1914–1998)

Octavio Paz, a famous poet, essayist, literary critic, and social philosopher, was born in Mexico City. He developed a talent for writing at an early age and cofounded a literary magazine called Barandal when he was sixteen years old. Paz published his first volume of poems, Forest Moon, when he was nineteen. 

Throughout his life, Octavio Paz had many opportunities to travel. As a young man, he traveled to Yucatan, Mexico, to found a school for children of farm workers. The Mayan ruins he visited on the trip led him to write the long poem Between the Stone and the Flower. After writing a poem against a military uprising in Spain, Paz was invited to Spain to join a group of anti-fascist writers. Later, in 1945, Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic corps. Throughout the next twenty-three years, he was assigned to embassies in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Some of his most important writings are a result of his time spent in diplomatic service. These writings include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and the long poem Sun Stone (1957). 

In 1968, Paz dedicated himself to teaching, writing, and editing. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1982, and in 1990 Paz became the first Mexican to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Octavio Paz died in 1998 after a prolific writing career in which he produced more than forty books.