Paz of Mexico Awarded Nobel for Literature

Poet and essayist Octavio Paz, whose haunting, evocative writing represents a combination of modern and classical Spanish with echoes of pre-conquest Mexico, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

The Swedish Academy of Letters, acting in Stockholm, honored the 76-year-old former diplomat for “impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.”

It praised his “exquisite love poetry” as well as his social and literary essays, and it particularly lauded his international perspective. His essays on Mexican society, the academy said, make him “a lodestar in the tide of opinion.”

Among Paz’s works cited by the academy was “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” an exploration of Mexican identity that has become a standard text in courses on Mexican history and political science since its publication in 1950.

The academy also made special mention of the 1957 poem “Sunstone,” inspired by a huge Aztec calendar stone, calling it a “suggestive work” that “seems to incorporate, interpret and reconstrue major existential questions--death, time, love and reality.”

Paz, who is in New York to help open an exhibition of Mexican art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said the award “was a total surprise.” He is the first Mexican citizen to win the literature prize.

At a news conference, Paz declared: “Poetry is not a very popular art form these days, but it’s an essential part of human life. Poetry is the memory of a country, of language.”

He added that the prize “is a sign that the Spanish and Latin American literature is in good health.”

The $700,000 prize “means great love for a writer, I suppose--not in the sense of a passport to immortality, but it gives the opportunity to have a wider audience,” he continued.

Paz was born in Mexico City on March 31, 1914. His mother was Spanish, from Andalusia, while his father was Indian and Spanish.

The academy said Paz’s poetry and essays “evolve from an intractable but fruitful union of cultures: pre-Columbian Indian, the Spanish Conquistadors and Western modernism.”

It added, “The poet himself embodies the union of cultures--it is in his blood.”

Paz styles himself as a socialist and a democrat, but his views have angered both the Mexican left and right. His independence has generated controversy throughout his career, especially by critics who perceive him as having broken with leftist ideas by criticizing Cuba and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas.

For more than a decade, he has campaigned vigorously against what he believes is a threat of Soviet and Cuban intervention in Latin America.

He also has often criticized the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has governed Mexico for more than 60 years. But on Thursday, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari said of Paz: “He is a poet and writer of whom we Mexicans feel proud. He has a universal stature.”

While declining to link himself with any ideology, Paz said at his news conference Thursday: “I am not pessimistic, and I do not think the left is dead. Some of the corruptions of the left have been discarded by history.”

Paz began writing for literary magazines at the age of 17. The son of a lawyer who was a Zapatista--one of Mexico’s most radical, peasant-based political factions--he attended the National University of Mexico and was an active supporter of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, helping many migrate to Mexico when Franco’s Fascists triumphed.

After his return to Mexico in 1938, Paz was one of the founders of the journal Taller (Workshop).

“As one of its contributors, he exerted strong influence on contemporary literature,” the Swedish Academy said Thursday. “This he has retained with great open-mindedness, for example, through other journals he has founded and edited.”

Like many Latin American writers and intellectuals, Paz joined the foreign service, representing Mexico in the United States, Japan and France.

His diplomatic career ended abruptly in 1968, when he resigned as ambassador to India to protest a police massacre of students during a protest in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza.

Paz wrote a poem to the students called “The Municipal Employees Clean the Blood from the Plaza of the Sacrifices.”

“It was very important for the (surviving) students to know that a government official supported them and to soothe the spirits of those who died,” said Elena Poniatowska, who wrote “The Night of Tlatelolco,” a book about the massacre.

Paz’s resignation showed his commitment “to developing an intellectual community independent of the state,” said Roderic Camp, an authority on the role of intellectuals in Mexican politics.

In that vein, Paz in 1976 founded Vuelta, a literary and political magazine that provides an independent forum for intellectuals. Last summer he organized an “intellectual encounter” about the future of Latin America that ended in controversy when Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and failed presidential candidate, called Mexico “a perfect dictatorship.”

Paz, who lives in Mexico City with his wife, Marie-Jose, is the second Mexican to win one of the six prestigious Nobel Prizes. Mexican diplomat Alfonso Garcia Robles shared the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of world disarmament.

Even those who dispute Paz’s ideas recognize his literary genius. When the Mexican newspaper La Jornada last year polled 14 Mexican writers on which of Paz’s 30 books they liked best, the publication received 10 different answers.

Several of those questioned, including the highly acclaimed Carlos Monsivais, admitted they had difficulty choosing.

“A body of work so intense and extraordinary does not permit one to choose one outstanding (book),” Monsivais said.

Another writer, Luis Cardoza y Aragon, commented that his favorite, “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” which is a collection of essays, “is not a book of prose--it is full of poetry.”

Besides “Labyrinth,” the Swedish academy made special mention of “Sor Juana, or the Traps of Faith,” a literary history of Mexico’s first great woman writer, and “A Tree Within,” a book of poetry published last year.

Paz himself has said his favorite work is always his latest. He currently is writing “The Other Voice,” a defense of poetry at the end of the century. He also said Thursday that he admires T. S. Eliot and French surrealist poets.

Indeed, poets should not despair if success initially eludes them, he said.

“We know very well that sometimes poets and novelists first were only read by a minority, but later they became classics,” he said. “It’s very difficult to be a poet, but it’s not so bad. Every day we have bestsellers, and then they disappear and are forgotten. Poets--with or without prizes--survive.”

MEXICO’S OCTAVIO PAZ: A SAMPLER

In his impassioned essays and sensuous poetry imbued with mythology and politics, Paz has helped shape Mexico’s idea of itself and long served as interpreter of his nation’s soul for the West. He uses the universal themes of love, death and loneliness. Here are excerpts from three of his best-known works. THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE

The 1950 essay, a classic analysis of the Mexican psyche, is considered his masterpiece. Here, Paz describes a visit to Los Angeles. “When I arrived in the United States, I lived for a while in Los Angeles, a city inhabited by over a million persons of Mexican origin. At first sight, the visitor is surprised not only by the purity of the sky and the ugliness of the dispersed and ostentatious buildings, but also by the city’s vaguely Mexican atmosphere, which cannot be captured in words or concepts. This Mexicanism--delight in decoration, carelessness and pomp, negligence, passion and reserve-- floats in the air. I say ‘floats’ because it never mixes or unites with the other world, the North American world based on precision and efficiency. It floats, without offering any opposition; it hovers, blown here and there by the wind, sometimes breaking up like a cloud, sometimes standing erect like a rising skyrocket. It creeps, it wrinkles, expands and contracts; it sleeps or dreams; it is ragged or beautiful. It floats, never quite existing, never quite vanishing.”

SUNSTONE

In this poem, published in 1957, love looms as the only salvation; physical love provides a momentary sense of order: “because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source, There is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of two in a single body, a single soul, oh total being. . . . “ A DRAFT OF SHADOWS

In this poem, first published in 1979, Paz’s images become more introspective. “Heard by the soul, footsteps in the mind more than shadows, shadows of thought more than footsteps through the path of echoes that memory invents and erases: without walking they walk over this present, bridge slung from one letter to the next.” SOURCE: “The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987”