My introduction to Octavio Paz’s poetry happened at the foyer of the American Embassy in New Delhi, 20 years ago. I was greeted by a huge picture of a tree orchestrating a glorious autumn sonata, with two lines at the bottom:
Self- crowned, the day displays its plumage./A shout tall and yellow…/a hot geyser to the middle sky!
It made an indelible impression and I made for the nearest bookshop to pick up a volume of Paz’s poetry. As I write this, an acacia tree is in dazzling bloom outside my window, and Paz’s striking lines rise up to meet this glorious image.
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Paz was indisputably one of Latin America’s leading poets, a fact borne out by the towering corpus of his oeuvre, and the several awards he won, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. His birth centenary year has a special significance for India. In 1962, he was nominated as Mexico’s ambassador to India, and his interactions here greatly influenced his writing and philosophy. It shaped his contention that time is not a linear concept, but a new form, with neither past nor future, but a present that projects us into the medulla, the invisible centre of time: the here and the now. He undertook a serious study of Indian art and philosophy. In fact, his writing is a seamless synthesis of his Native Ameican traditions, those of India, and the international avant-garde.
It was during this period that he wrote, inter alia, East Slope (Ladera Este) , In Light Of India , and several poems dedicated to the places he visited, like Himachal Pradesh, Udaipur, Kochi, Kanyakumari, Madurai, Mysore, and Udhagamandalam. In 1968, he resigned, protesting against the Mexican government’s massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco.
A prolific writer as well, Paz considered himself primarily a poet. To him, “the poem is a shell that echoes the music of the world”. Paz’s poetry is both graphic, and luminous. Think of “Light builds temples on the sea.” (
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Take these lines from “Day”:
“…a tree obliterated/to be freighted down with future leaves…/the new leaves…/…(are) vegetable exclamations,/onomatopoeias of celebration/of the year’s chemical resurrection,…/...day/is going down in fire, in foliage.” Consider the imagery in these lines: The bougainvillea flattened by the sun/Against the wall's white lime/a stain/a purple/passionate calligraphy… ”
Paz’s poetry of protest is powerful and disturbing: “ The sun rises from its bed of bones/The air is not air/It strangles without arms or hands .”
Paz had an all-embracing vision of man and the universe. “ God, men and beasts/Eat from the same plate .”
The poetry of Octavio Paz subsumed the political, the historical, the personal, the emotional, the social and the mystical and carved a luminous new poetics on the tablet of time.