Octavio paz

Biography
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 otherprogressive 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 newgeneration 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 AndreBreton 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 thegovernment'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 includethe 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 thatboth 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 aprolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.
Poesía |
Luna silvestre. México, Fabula, 1933. |
No pasarán! México, Simbad, 1936 |
Raíz del hombre. México, Simbad, 1937. |
Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España. Valencia, Ediciones Españolas, 1937. |
Entre la piedra yla flor. México, Nueva Voz, 1941. |
A la orilla del mundo. México, ARS, 1942. |
Libertad bajo palabra. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1949. |
Semillas para un himno. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1954. |
Piedra de sol. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957. |
La estación violenta. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958. |
Salamandra (1958-1961). México, Joaquín Mortiz,1962. |
Viento entero. Delhi, The Caxton Press, 1965. |
Blanco. México, Joaquin Mortiz, 1967. |
Discos visuales. México, Ediciones ERA, 1968 (Arte de Vicente Rojo). |
Ladera Este (1962-1968). México, Joaquín Mortiz, 1969. |
La centena (1935-1968). Barcelona, Barral, 1969. |
Topoemas, México, Ediciones ERA, 1971. |
Renga. México, Joaquín Mortiz, 1972. Poema colectivo con Jacques...