The recent death of Octavio Paz will long be lamented not only in the Spanish-speaking world, in which he reigned supreme as poet and essayist, but also outside that world, where his literary and intellectual gifts were equally recognised and acclaimed - he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.
Born in Mexico in 1914, Paz, like Pablo Neruda, for many years combined a diplomatic career with his literary pursuits. And wherever his diplomatic appointments took him - to places such as India or Paris or Tokyo or the United States - he fed off the cultures of these places to nourish his own poetry and thought. His meeting with Andre Breton in 1945 and his involvement with Surrealism were key events in his life although he was never overpowered by any one influence.
Politically always progressive, Paz sided with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and as late as 1968 he resigned as Mexican Ambassador to India in protest at the repressive measures employed by the Mexican government in quelling the student protests shortly before the Olympic Games.
As a writer, Paz is in the tradition of his fellow Mexican, Alfonso Reyes, and the Argentine Borges: writers engrossed with the literatures of the world, polyglots and polymaths, constantly reflecting on the mechanics of writing, amateur scholars who through the breadth of their knowledge frequently outshone the professional scholars; the three of them writing probably the best Spanish prose of this century.
Paz was illimitably curious. He speculated extensively and profoundly on poetics, painting, cultural anthropology, religion, politics, to name the most important subjects that concerned him. He has been described as atavistic and telluric in his outlook, and certainly he concerned himself with the past. Yet this is not an accurate description of Paz's orientation. Paz knew that the world did not begin in the 20th century, with its science and technology and philosophical empiricism and international corporate capitalism. There were worlds before all of this. Ancient worlds. Worlds infused with wisdom that taught people how to behave morally and beautifully, how to create, how to care for this place where we mysteriously find ourselves.
But it is as a poet that Octavio Paz will doubtless be best remembered. A good sampling of his poetry (though not always well translated) can be found in Sun Stone, translated by Muriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems, also translated by Rukeyser, and Renga, a collaboration with Jacques Roubard, Edoardo Sanguinetti and Charles Tomlinson.
As one might expect, Paz's poetry is always experimental. For him, language, and poetic language most of all, is our chief instrument for understanding the world. And every language offers its own special vision of the world. He has written memorably: "Every language that dies is a vision of humanity that is lost forever," which should be taken to heart by those who are facilely dismissive of the importance of the Irish language.
Language, then, was of paramount concern to Paz. Through language (or rather languages) we can discover what it means to be human; furthermore, viewed in this way, the very act of discovering, of exploration and experimentation, becomes a deeply human experience, alluring both the poet and his collaborative readers with the possibility of a transcendent vision of human life.
Love, for Paz, is equally important. Not love as animal, reproductive sexuality, but a sexual, erotic relationship that corresponds to a particular person. And in that kind of love (expounded brilliantly in Paz's The Double Flame), just as in language, there lies that possibility of a redemptive transcendence.
The following lines from a poem of his, "Paisaje Immemorial" (Immemorial Landscape), written in 1972, seems to be to say something that lies at the heart of all of Paz's poetry (and more besides):
One day these houses will be hills again
the wind among the stones will speak to itself.
Oblique among the shadows
the shadowless will fall
almost blue on the earth.
The same as now the snow of a million years ago.