* From “The Art of Poetry” No. 42
Though small in stature and well into his seventies, Octavio Paz, with his piercing eyes, gives the impression of being a much younger man. In his poetry and his prose works, which are both erudite and intensely political, he recurrently takes up such themes as the experience of Mexican history, especially as seen through its Indian past, and the overcoming of profound human loneliness through erotic love. Paz has long been considered, along with César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, to be one of the great South American poets of the twentieth century; three days after this interview, which was conducted on Columbus Day 1990, he joined Neruda among the ranks of Nobel laureates in literature.
Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City, the son of a lawyer and the grandson of a novelist. Both figures were important to the development of the young poet: he learned the value of social causes from his father, who served as counsel for the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and was introduced to the world of letters by his grandfather. As a boy, Paz was allowed to roam freely through his grandfather’s expansive library, an experience that afforded him invaluable exposure to Spanish and Latin American literature. He studied literature at the University of Mexico, but moved on before earning a degree.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz sided immediately with the Republican cause and, in 1937, left for Spain. After his return to Mexicao, he helped found the literary reviews Taller (“Workshop”) and El Hijo Pródigo (“The Child Prodigy”) out of which a new generation of Mexican writers emerged. In 1943 Paz traveled extensively in the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship before entering into the Mexican diplomatic service in 1945. From 1946 until 1951, Paz lived in Paris. The writings of Sartre, Breton, Camus, and other French thinkers whom he met at that same time were to be an important influence on his own work. In the early 1950s Paz’s diplomatic duties took him to Japan and India, where he first came into contact with the Buddhist and Taoist classics. He has said, “More than two thousand years away, Western poetry is essential to Buddhist teaching: that the self is an illusion, a sum of sensations, thoughts, and desire. In October 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post to protest the bloody repression of student demonstrations in Mexico City by the government.
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