Mexico Pays Homage to Poet Paz, Its ‘Teacher’

From government leaders and billionaire businessmen to jeans-clad students and workers, this nation on Monday mourned the death of Octavio Paz, its Nobel Prize-winning poet and philosopher who died over the weekend at age 84.

“Octavio Paz is a teacher of Mexico and the world. He will forever form part of the consciousness of our country and our era,” a somber President Ernesto Zedillo told scores of black-suited mourners--including much of the country’s political and intellectual elite--at a memorial service before Paz’s casket in the nation’s Palace of Fine Arts.

Outside, away from the television lights and bodyguards, stretched a line of hundreds of Mexicans, clutching flowers and water bottles, fanning themselves with newspapers under a harsh sun. Some had traveled hours to pay their respects to a man who plumbed the Mexican psyche and sang the glory of a long-suffering nation.

Some mourners called Paz a master poet; others, a defender of political liberty; still others, Mexico’s abuelo (grandfather).

“You can’t understand modern Mexico without Octavio Paz,” summed up Fernando Belaunzaran, a 28-year-old bureaucrat wearing a black ribbon who watched mourners leave the service.

Praise for Poet Echoed Around World

The praise was echoed around the world.

“We in the United States will remember him with great affection and gratitude for his revealing explanations of the reality and complexity of our southern neighbor,” said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin.

Paz died at home in southern Mexico City shortly before midnight Sunday, after a long illness that colleagues said was cancer.

He has been described as one of the top poets of the 20th century, blending imaginative and realistic elements in taut verse. But his importance went well beyond poetry. In the tradition of Latin American literary titans, Paz was a cosmopolitan writer who deeply influenced his nation’s thought. He was as famed here for his poetry as for his biting critiques of politics--especially of the leftist ideas long fashionable among Latin American intellectuals. He wrote about a broad range of themes, from Mexican painting to love to Aztec civilization.

While his work appealed to a worldwide audience, it was deeply grounded in Mexico’s history and culture. “The theme of my country is a theme that has concerned me throughout my entire life,” Paz told the Mexican daily La Jornada in 1993. “It’s my theme. It probably is me.”

Nobelist Grew Up in Crumbling Home

Paz was born March 31, 1914. He grew up in a crumbling home in a Mexico City suburb amid the chaos of civil war. His father, a lawyer who fought with peasant leader Emiliano Zapata, died when he was young. “As rooms collapsed, we moved the furniture into others,” he told interviewer Rita Guibert for her 1973 book “Seven Voices.”

But the house was full of books, the property of Paz’s grandfather, a prominent journalist and writer. Paz began writing poetry in his mid-teens and, in 1933, at age 19, published his first book of poetry, “Luna Silvestre” (“Forest Moon”).

After studying law at university, Paz turned his sights overseas. He traveled to Spain and supported the Republican forces fighting right-wing Gen. Francisco Franco. In 1944, he went to Los Angeles on a Guggenheim scholarship and traveled widely in the United States, teaching classes, working in radio and dubbing films. Later, like many Mexican writers and intellectuals, he joined his country’s foreign service, working in France, Japan and the United States. In his spare time, he wrote poetry and essays.

His breakthrough as a diplomat came in 1962, when he was named ambassador to India. The country ended up influencing his work. Paz said in “Seven Voices” that India taught him and his wife about friendship, respect for plants and animals, and the concept that “we are all part of the same unity.”

“Above all,” he said, “we learned to be silent.”

It was in India that Paz met Marie Jose Tramini, the charismatic Frenchwoman whom he married in 1964. “After being born,” Paz said, “that’s the most important thing that has happened to me.”

But his term in India came to an abrupt end in October 1968, when he resigned in indignation at a government massacre of student protesters in Mexico City.

While working as a diplomat, Paz wrote perhaps his best-known work, “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” published in 1950. The controversial book explored the contradictions of the Mexican character and people, a result of having roots in both the Spanish and pre-Hispanic Indian cultures.

“He went against the idea that Mexicans suffered from an inferiority complex,” said Enrico Mario Santi, a professor of Latin American literature at Georgetown University, in a recent interview. “He downplayed inferiority and put forth loneliness” as a defining Mexican characteristic.

Many initially called “Labyrinth” insulting. But Paz gradually came to be lionized for his penetrating essays on Mexican culture. “He was a miner of the Mexican soul,” historian Enrique Krauze, a close collaborator of Paz, said at Monday’s memorial service.

Swedish Academy Cites ‘Fruitful Union’

In awarding Paz the Nobel Prize in literature in 1990, the Swedish Academy cited essays such as “Labyrinth” and the writer’s poetry. “Paz’s poetry and essays evolve from an intractable but fruitful union of cultures: pre-Columbian Indian, the Spanish conquistadors and Western modernism,” the citation said.

Reflecting the range of Paz’s work, the academy paid special homage to his love poetry, calling it “sensuous and visual.”

The academy also made special mention of the 1957 poem “Sunstone”; “Sor Juana, or the Traps of Faith,” a literary history of Mexico’s first major female writer; and “A Tree Within,” a book of poetry published in 1989.

In later decades, Paz’s work was marked by a willingness to use experimental modes. One long poem, for example, was printed on a folding scroll to allow a number of alternative readings.

Santi, a longtime Paz scholar, said: “Usually poets who are very passionate are not intellectual presences. Paz combines both. He is a passionate poet and a man of ideas.”

His ideas, however, cost him many friends. In his youth, Paz was a socialist. But he later described himself as a “disillusioned leftist” and became one of the few prominent Latin American intellectuals who attacked left-wing authoritarian governments, such as Cuba’s Communist authorities and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas.

His views earned him the wrath of Latin American intellectuals who viewed U.S. intervention as the chief threat in the region. Once, after stating that Nicaragua needed free elections, Paz was even burned in effigy outside the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. “The excommunication I was given isolated me and surrounded me with whispered calumnies,” Paz told the Mexico City daily Reforma in 1996.

Paz made enemies among right-wing as well as left-wing groups. He was an outspoken critic of the one-party system that has dominated Mexican political life for the past 70 years.

In addition to writing poetry and essays, Paz headed some of Latin America’s outstanding literary and political magazines. In 1976, he founded Vuelta (Turn), to provide an independent forum for intellectuals. He earlier published the magazine Plural and helped found the journal Taller (Workshop).

His many honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1982), the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, and the T.S. Eliot Award (1987). He also taught at prominent universities such as Cambridge and Harvard.

Government, Business Establish Foundation

In December, the Mexican government and business executives honored Paz with a foundation in his name dedicated to encouraging writers and literary scholarship. This was also his last public appearance. His frail figure, slumped in a wheelchair, stunned some Mexicans. Paz had reportedly been suffering from cancer and, after fire ravaged his Mexico City home in 1996, from depression.

But on this occasion his spirits were high. “I am sure that new days are coming for Mexico, and these days will be full of light, with sun, and love. I think in these years a period isn’t ending in Mexico, as is commonly thought, but that we are turning a corner and continuing on,” he said.

Paz is survived by his wife from an earlier marriage, Elena Garro, and their daughter Helena, as well as by his second wife.

Despite his profile as a political and social commentator in Mexico, Paz considered himself foremost a poet. He once told an interviewer: “I would like to leave a half-dozen poems that, perhaps, from time to time, would be remembered by a future reader. To be read as I have read some poets. Nothing more.”

Sheridan is The Times’ Mexico City Bureau chief and Randolph is a researcher.

* BY AND ABOUT OCTAVIO PAZ

A look back at Paz’s 1990 Nobel speech, and Mario Vargas Llosa offers an appreciation. E1