20th Century Mexican Poet
A Mexican born in 1914, Paz was an immensely prolific poet, translator, literary and visual art critic, historian, magazine editor, anthologist, and political analyst. His complete works in Spanish take up fifteen very large volumes. In 1946, New Directions published the first translations of Paz in any language. These were followed by Sun Stone (translated by Muriel Rukeyser, 1963); Configurations (1971); Early Poems 1935-1955 (1973); the prose poems Eagle or Sun?(1976); A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems (1979); Selected Poems (1984); The Collected Poems 1957-1987 (1987); A Tree Within (1988); Sunstone (translated by Eliot Weinberger, 1991); A Tale of Two Gardens: Poems from India 1952-1995 (1997); and a collaboration with his wife, the artist Marie-José Paz, Figures & Figurations (2002). Poems 1931-1986, edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2012. Among Paz's many prose books in English translation are The Labyrinth of Solitude; Sor Juana, or the Traps of Faith; Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature; The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism; and In Light of India. Octavio Paz received the Nobel Prize in 1990. He died in 1998.
The Poems of Octavio Paz
Figures & Figurations
Selected Poems of Octavio Paz
A Tale Of Two Gardens
Sunstone
Collected Poems 1957-1987
A Tree Within
A Draft Of Shadows
Eagle Or Sun?
Early Poems 1935-1955
Configurations
“Readers will marvel at Paz's variety: haiku-like miniatures; the tempestuous book-length poem 'Sunstone'; fast-moving prose poems; abstract odes; extended descriptions of places in Mexico, India, Afghanistan, and Japan.”
“The pleasure of this volume is the consistent, almost gentle voice that lays out for the reader Paz's convictions and questions. 'Gentle' though should not indicate easy of peaceful or unquestioning. Paz raises his anxieties, doubts, and disruptions. Rather it is the artfulness with which he does so that carries the reader along.”
“That rarity, an authoritative translation that should get sustained U.S. attention, and that often sounds right read aloud.”
— Publishers Weekly on Octavio Paz's The Poems of Octavio Paz
“Huidobro is the invisible oxygen of our poetry. ”
— Octavio Paz on Vicente Huidobro
“The greatness of a poet is not to be measured by the scale but by the intensity and perfection of his works. Also by his vivacity. Williams is the author of the most vivid poems of modern American poetry.”
— Octavio Paz on William Carlos Williams's Something to Say
“For José Emilio Pacheco time is the agent of universal destruction, and history—the passage of ruins... Pacheco exalts the triumph of nature over culture, but in exalting it, doesn't he transfigure it, changing it into the word, or—as he puts it—into 'fleeting music, the counterpoint of wind and water'?”
— Octavio Paz on José Emilio Pacheco's Selected Poems of Jose Emilio Pacheco
“A rich temperament, a remarkable, linguistic inventiveness, and a vision both original and universal.”
— Octavio Paz on Nathaniel Tarn's Ins & Outs Of The Forest Rivers
Saint John Perse
Homero Aridjis
Gennady Aygi
Tomas Tranströmer
José Maria de Eça de Queirós
Romain Gary
Frédéric Mistral