Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz in 1984
Ambassador of Mexico to India
In office April 26, 1962 – October 18, 1968
Nominated by	Adolfo López Mateos
Appointed by	Senate of the Republic
Preceded by	Salvador Pardo Bolland
Succeeded by	Carlos César Gutiérrez Macías
Ambassador of Mexico to Japan Ad interim
In office May 8, 1952 – October 2, 1952
Nominated by	Miguel Alemán Valdés
Appointed by	Senate of the Republic
Preceded by	José Luis Amezcua
Succeeded by	Manuel Maples Arce
Personal details
Born	Octavio Irineo Paz Lozano March 31, 1914 Mexico City (Mexico)
Died	April 19, 1998 (aged 84) Mexico City (Mexico)
Spouse(s)	Elena Garro ​ ​ (m. 1937; div. 1959)​ Marie José Tramini ​ ​ (m. 1964;  1998)​
Children	Helena Paz Garro
Parent(s)	Octavio Paz Solórzano Josefa Lozano
Occupation	Writer and diplomat
Awards	Cervantes Prize in 1981 Nobel Prize in 1990
Writing career
Genres	Poetry and essay

Octavio Paz (Mexico City, March 31, 1914 – Mexico City, April 19, 1998), registered at birth as Octavio Irineo Paz Lozano, was a Mexican poet, essayist and diplomat. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990 and the Cervantes Prize in 1981. He is considered one of the most influential authors of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets of all time.

Biography

Early years

Octavio Paz was born on March 31, 1914, during the Mexican Revolution. Just a few months later, when his father, Octavio Paz Solórzano, joined the Zapatista army together with Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, his mother, Josefina Lozano, took him to live in the house of his paternal grandfather, Ireneo Paz, in Mixcoac, then a village near Mexico City. They lived there until Octavio Paz Solórzano had to seek asylum in Los Angeles as the representative of Emiliano Zapata before the United States, a post he held until the year of Zapata's assassination (1919).

During that time he was cared for by his mother Josefina Lozano, his aunt Amalia Paz Solórzano and his paternal grandfather, Ireneo Paz (1836–1924), a retired soldier of the forces of Porfirio Díaz, a liberal intellectual and novelist. His father, Octavio Paz Solórzano (1883–1935), the youngest of seven siblings, worked as a scribe and lawyer for Emiliano Zapata; he was involved in the agrarian reform that followed the Revolution, was a deputy and collaborated actively in the Vasconcelista movement. All these activities caused his father to be away from home for long periods.

Student life

His education began in the United States, where his father Paz Solórzano had arrived in October 1916 as Zapata's representative.

The stay in the United States, of almost two years, meant for Octavio Paz a confrontation with the impossibility of communicating; as Paz recalls, in Los Angeles his parents took him to a school, "and since I did not speak a single word of English it was very hard for me to communicate with my classmates. On the first day there was mockery and, of course, a fight. I came home with my clothes torn, one eye half-closed and a split lip. Two years later I returned to Mexico and suffered the same among my compatriots: once again mockery and punches."

In 1929 José Vasconcelos launched himself into the great adventure of seeking the presidency, backed by the legitimate aspirations of a social sector identified with university autonomy. Swept up by the student strike, Octavio Paz, despite not having taken part in the Vasconcelista movement, shared the ideal that guided it and found himself caught up "in the great Vasconcelista faith, in that fervor that later produced many things and, among them, a pro-worker and pro-peasant student organization from which in turn emerged many people who over the years converted to Marxism or to Sinarquismo."

Octavio Paz adhered to the anarchism upheld by José Bosch, a young Catalan whom he met at that time and who would introduce him to "libertarian thought." A time also of choices, Paz would face what would become the dilemma of his generation: politics or violence, "hence the predisposition of some toward extreme solutions: the tendencies toward fascism or toward Marxism. I identified with the people of the left."

Embracing this choice, and being consistent with it, at fifteen Octavio Paz became an activist of the short-lived Student Union for Workers and Peasants, and began reading Kropotkin, Eliseo Réclus, José Ferrer and Proudhon, the background with which he entered the National Preparatory School of San Ildefonso, where he would meet an old acquaintance of his father, Antonio Díaz Soto and Gamaliel Santana Banda, who, as teacher and friend, would lead him to share the idea that the Zapatista movement embodied the true spirit of the Revolution.

First literary experiences

He was dazzled by reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, translated by Enrique Munguía as El páramo and published in the magazine Contemporáneos in 1930. That is why, although poetry remained the priority interest in his activities, he also attended, from prose, to an inevitable panorama: "Literally, this dual practice was for me a play of reflections between poetry and prose."

Concerned with confirming the existence of links between morality and poetry, in 1931, at sixteen, he wrote what would be his first published article, "Ética del artista" ("The Ethics of the Artist"), in which, before posing the question of the artist's duty between what he calls thesis art and pure art, he disqualifies the latter on the grounds of the teaching of tradition. Assimilating a language reminiscent of the religious and, paradoxically, the Marxist style, he finds the true value of art in its intention, in its meaning, so that the followers of pure art, lacking it, find themselves in an isolated position and favor the Kantian idea of the "man who loses all relationship with the world."    

The magazine Barandal appeared in August 1931, directed by Rafael López Malo, Salvador Toscano, Arnulfo Martínez Lavalle and Octavio Paz, young men preceded, except for Salvador Toscano, by a certain literary celebrity owed to their fathers. Rafael López had taken part in the magazine "Moderna" and, like Miguel D. Martínez Rendón, in the Agorista movement, although he was more talked about and known among the preparatory students above all for his poem "La bestia de oro". Octavio Paz Solórzano was known in this circle as the occasional author of literary narratives that appeared in the Sunday supplement of the newspaper El Universal, besides which Ireneo Paz was already the name that gave identity to a street in Mixcoac.

Amid encounters, true confrontations, between representatives of the Ateneo generation, especially those who gathered in the Ateneo de la Juventud Mexicana, later called the Ateneo de México, and of the Seven Sages, over the ruins of a positivism surviving in newspaper chronicles in which the possibilities of historical materialism were debated, socialist realism grew as the only viable doctrine, to which all, or almost all, who sympathized with the promises of communism were to adhere. Octavio Paz, close to these ideas, founded, after the disappearance of the magazine Barandal and by then enrolled in the Law School of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), some Cuadernos del Valle de México that only managed to come out for two issues, but which served, besides publishing some poems, to confirm that the original group would not have the solidity to continue a common enterprise.

In 1933, Octavio Paz published the poetry collection Luna Silvestre, edited by Miguel N. Lira, which already revealed a certain assimilation of Romantic themes; as Carlos H. Magis puts it, "the poems of Luna Silvestre touch on aspects of the Romantic spirit still in force in modern poetry: detachment from purely sensory reality, the mystery of poetry, the truth of dreams."

The seven poems of Luna silvestre would find no place in the revision Paz later made of his work, but they nonetheless reveal a rigor in the word, rocked in its own sensuality, seduced by the elusive presence of woman, of nature. Desire and passion wander through the poems as if detached from silence and memory; they recreate and remember themselves, they become fixed and fade away in the utterance.

At this point, attached to an intimist kind of writing, Paz had the opportunity to show his poems to Rafael Alberti, who pointed out to him a contradiction between his revolutionary ideal of poetry and of politics. Having arrived in Mexico in 1934, Rafael Alberti represented the embodiment of the poet of the new times, the advent of a socialist language congruent with poetry: his presence was an event that fascinated above all the youngest, who were his best readers. "Bearing as his banner the poem La toma del poder by Louis Aragon," as Efraín Huerta recalls, Alberti came as a member of the Spanish Communist Party to give a series of lectures, after which he met with the young poets, among them Octavio Paz, who recalls that "One night, all of us who surrounded him read him our poems... We were all on the left, but even then I felt a certain mistrust of political poetry and of the literature that was later called 'committed.' At that time, in 1934, Alberti was writing political poetry—it is the period of Consignas—, that little book in which he had asserted that poetry should be at the service of the Communist Party, a position very similar to that of Louis Aragon in France. And when I showed my poems to Alberti, he told me: 'Well, this is not social poetry' (on the contrary, it was intimist poetry—a horrible word, intimist, but that is what it was: intimist), 'it is not revolutionary poetry in the political sense,' Alberti said, 'but Octavio is the only revolutionary poet among all of you, because he is the only one in whom there is an attempt to transform language.'"

The confrontation with fate provokes rebellions: Octavio Paz, withdrawn into himself, confronts himself. The quality of his Romantic expressions begins to take on true meaning, and he begins a more attentive reading of Saint John of the Cross, Novalis, Rilke and D. H. Lawrence, in whom he finds the same interest in building bridges between life and poetry, between reality and myth: the unveiling of that point of intersection he would call "communion." The intimate diary he began to write would not be published until four years later, in 1938, under the title Vigilias: diario de un soñador, in the magazine Taller, by which time two momentous events in his life had taken place: his stay in Yucatán and the Spanish Civil War.

At the end of 1936, Octavio Paz wrote the first version of the poetry book Raíz del Hombre, which was published in January of the following year. The book was greeted by two reviews: one critical and sharp, by Jorge Cuesta, the other merciless and uneasy, by Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano; both, published in issue number two of the magazine Letras de México, reflect the vision of a group forged in attacks and incomprehension.

Second International Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture.

Jorge Cuesta, an acquaintance of Paz since 1935, highlights in him a will to let himself be consumed by his object, recognizes him as possessing a destiny and notes a kinship with the voices of Ramón López Velarde, Carlos Pellicer, Xavier Villaurrutia and Pablo Neruda. Raíz del Hombre would, to a great extent, dispel the silence that had surrounded Luna silvestre and ¡No pasarán!; in his relationship with the Contemporáneos it would modify the view his last poem had provoked—considered by Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano a text that was not poetry; it would also be the poetry collection that would make him known to Pablo Neruda and that would allow him in 1937 to be invited to the Second International Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture, held in Spain, for having written the poem ¡No pasarán!—.

Although Paz had known some of the Contemporáneos since his Barandal days, the book and its reception earned him the chance to meet all of them together. Before Xavier Villaurrutia and Jorge Cuesta, Ortiz de Montellano, José and Celestino Gorostiza, Samuel Ramos, Octavio G. Barreda (director of Letras de México), Jaime Torres Bodet, Enrique González Rojo and Abbé Mendoza, Paz was once again questioned: "They questioned me at length about the contradiction they seemed to notice between my political opinions and my poetic tastes."

Folding, then, upon his own anguish, Octavio Paz understood that only through renunciation could he obtain. Renouncing his law studies, renouncing his family, renouncing the city: an act of detachment that attempted, or was akin to, the establishment of a congruence between politics and poetics, a congruence seen but not felt. In 1937 he left for Mérida, Yucatán, for a period of four months during which, together with Octavio Novaro and Ricardo Cortés Tamayo, he took part in founding a secondary school for workers' children, during which he wrote for El Diario del Sureste—the same newspaper to which Efraín Huerta had contributed a year earlier—, during which he helped organize a Pro-Spanish Democracy Committee, and during which he wrote the poem "Entre la piedra y la flor."

A time to touch reality: Octavio Paz encounters an endearing and strange land, a welcoming space bound by memory and vanishing at the edge of discovery; another life, another presence throbs and is breathed amid the heat: that of the indigenous, an image that rises in the light as a sign to be deciphered or understood, which demands an action, as Octavio Paz says: "From this encounter stems, in reality, every attempt at understanding, every effort to approach what truly moves the Peninsula. Here the indigenous does not signify the case of a culture capable of surviving, precariously and anxiously, in the face of the Western, but that of the enduring and extraordinarily vital features of a race that tinges and invades with its spirit the superficial white physiognomy of a society."

In June 1937, Octavio Paz's activities in Yucatán were suddenly interrupted by a "letter of invitation to the Congress. The letter, I believe, was signed by Pablo Neruda and Rafael Alberti." This was the Second International Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture, which was to be held from July 4 to 17, 1937 in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, the latter city being the seat of the Republican government presided over by Juan Negrín.

The event, swaying between a timid critical distance and a coronation of dogmatism, would be attended by more than a hundred writers, among them André Malraux, Tristan Tzara and Julien Benda, from France; M. Koltszov and A. Tolstoi, from Russia; W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, from England; Malcom Cowley, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, from the United States; Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén and Juan Marinello, from Cuba; César Vallejo, from Peru; González Tuñón, from Argentina; Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda, from Chile; José Bergamín, Antonio Machado and Rafael Alberti, from Spain; and on Mexico's behalf the delegation of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR): José Chávez Morado and Fernando Gamboa—who would mount the exhibition Cien años de Grabados Políticos Mexicanos—, José Mancisidor, Juan de la Cabada, Silvestre Revueltas—who on his return to Mexico would compose the Homage to García Lorca—and the educator Ma. Luisa Vera. Invited by Neruda and Alberti, Carlos Pellicer would also attend, known for his Catholicism and frank anti-fascism; he and Paz were the only Mexicans who did not belong to LEAR, although, unlike Paz, he was not viewed with as much suspicion, much less with the disapproval of some groups for his reluctance toward the doctrine of socialist realism; Paz thus traveled under the veiled accusation of being a Trotskyist, without being one. Paz had recently married Elena Garro, with whom he also traveled to the congress.

Octavio Paz's trip to Spain was preceded by an admiration for the poets of the Generation of '27, known in Mexico above all through the Antología poética en honor a Góngora edited by Gerardo Diego on the occasion of the celebration and recovery of the Baroque poet three hundred years after his death, and in which Diego's proposal was to create verbal objects that in their incantation would go beyond verse. This anthology made known poems by García Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén and Manuel Altolaguirre. With this background, Octavio Paz went to meet a generation torn in the search for an alternative for poetry, which faced a reality unsubmissive to the proclamation of a new man.

Together with Carlos Pellicer, Octavio Paz arrived in Paris on July 1, 1937. There he met Neruda and Vallejo, the "myth born of the ocean" and the "vagabond of the city," as he called them. From Paris they went to Barcelona and from there to Valencia, where the inauguration was to take place.

His father withdrew from politics in 1928, and died on March 10, 1935, in the colonia of Santa Marta Acatitla, when he was run over by a train, in an accident caused by his drunkenness. After his father's death, he went to Spain to fight on the Republican side in the civil war, and took part in the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals. On returning to Mexico he was one of the founders of Taller (1938) and El Hijo Pródigo.

In 1937 he traveled to Yucatán as a member of the educational missions of General Lázaro Cárdenas at a school for the children of workers and peasants in Mérida. There he began writing Entre la piedra y la flor (1941, revised in 1976), a poem about the dramatic exploitation of the countryside and of the Yucatecan peasant. He was married to the playwright, writer and poet Elena Garro, whom he met at UNAM (1937–1959), and with whom he had a daughter, Laura Helena Paz Garro, divorcing in 1950. In 1959 he took up with Bona Tibertelli de Pisis, with whom he lived until 1965, while he was ambassador of Mexico to India. The following year he married the Frenchwoman Marie José Tramini, his companion until the end.

In 1937, Paz was invited to Spain during the civil war as a member of the Mexican delegation to the Antifascist Congress, where he showed his solidarity with the Republicans, and where he met and dealt with the poets of the magazine Hora de España, whose political and literary ideology influenced his youthful work. However, as he confessed years later in the television series Conversaciones con Octavio Paz, that feeling of solidarity with the Republican cause was affected by the repression against the militants of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification of Catalonia, among whom he had comrades. This prolonged process of disillusionment would lead him to denounce the Soviet concentration camps and the crimes of Stalin in March 1951.

On his return from Spain, in 1938 he took part as co-founder of the literary magazine Taller, in which he wrote until 1941.

In 1943 he received the Guggenheim Fellowship and began his studies at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. Two years later he began serving as a Mexican diplomat, and was posted to France, where he remained until 1951, where he met the Surrealists, who influenced him, and where he collaborated on the magazine Esprit. During that stay, in 1950, he published El laberinto de la soledad, an innovative anthropological essay on Mexican thought and identity.

From January to March 1952 he worked at the Mexican embassy in India and then, until January 1953, in Japan. He returned to Mexico City to head the International Organizations office of the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs.

In 1954, Paz had "a very close involvement in the founding of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura," influenced "politically by the idea of the so-called 'third way,' which meant neither with the left nor with the right. This idea came from Paris, with Léon Blum." The first issue was that of September–October 1955, and the magazine had Paz's support until he returned to Europe four years later.

In 1955 he contributed to the Revista Mexicana de Literatura and to El Corno Emplumado. In 1956, he took part in Poesía en voz alta.

In 1959 he returned to Paris, and three years later he was appointed ambassador to India. In 1964 he met the Frenchwoman Marie-José Tramini, who would become his last wife.

In 1968, he was in New Delhi when the Tlatelolco massacre took place on October 2 as part of the Mexican Movement of 1968. As a sign of protest against these regrettable events, which tarnished the celebration of the Olympic Games, he resigned his post as ambassador, making his differences with the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz plain. He was the only one who dared to do so. He would spend the following years teaching at various American universities, such as those of Texas, Austin, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Harvard.

Three years later, in October 1971, now under the presidency of Luis Echeverría, "somewhat with that idea of rediscovering liberal and democratic values in Mexican society," he founded the magazine Plural, "an elegant fusion of literature and politics," which Paz himself would direct until its disappearance in 1976. Unlike other Mexican writers and intellectuals, Paz was quick to withdraw his support from President Echeverría once the latter showed his scant willingness to clarify the massacres of Tlatelolco, in 1968, and of San Cosme, the so-called Jueves de Corpus (Corpus Thursday), in 1971, in which there was a brutal repression of a student protest.

Both in that magazine and in Vuelta—founded that same year of 1976 and in which "the influence of liberalism would be fundamental," reflecting the writer's "reconciliation" with this current of thought— Paz denounced the human rights violations of communist regimes. This brought him much animosity from the Latin American left and from some university students. In the prologue to volume IX of his complete works, published in 1993, Paz stated:

In Mexico, I had previously been viewed with suspicion and mistrust; from then on, the distrust began to turn into an ever more open and intense enmity. But in those days [the 1950s] I did not imagine that the vituperation would accompany me for years and years, until now. (Page 44).

Death

On April 19, 1998, Octavio Paz, aged 84, died at the Casa de Alvarado, located on Francisco Sosa street in the barrio of Santa Catarina, Coyoacán, Mexico City. The writer, already ill, had been moved there by the Presidency of the Republic in January 1997, after a fire destroyed his apartment (at Río Guadalquivir 109, on the corner of Paseo de la Reforma, one block from the "Ángel" of Independence) and part of his library on Sunday, December 22, 1996. For a time, the Casa Alvarado was the seat of the Octavio Paz Foundation, and it is now that of the Fonoteca Nacional.

Literary style

Experimentation and nonconformism may be the two words that best define his poetic work. Even so, Paz is a poet who is difficult to pigeonhole. None of the labels assigned by critics fits his poetry: a neo-modernist poet in his beginnings; later, an existential poet; and, at times, a poet with touches of surrealism. No label suits him and none is superfluous, although Paz himself acknowledged that in his formation "the Surrealists were fundamental, with whom I became friends in '46 or '47, and who at that time were closer to the libertarians."

In reality, he is a poet who did not put down roots in any movement, because he was always alert to the changes taking place in the field of poetry and was always experimenting, so that his poetry, like all profound poetry, ended up becoming a very personal and original expression. Moreover, he is a poet of great lyricism whose verses contain images of great beauty. After the social concern present in his first books, he began to address themes of existential root, such as loneliness and the lack of communication. One of the most frequent obsessions in his poems is the desire to flee from time, which led him to create a spatial poetry whose poems the author himself christened topoemas (from topos + poema). This is what spatial poetry means: poetry opposed to typical temporal and discursive poetry. It is an intellectual, minority poetry, almost metaphysical, in which visual signs are included in addition to linguistic signs. In the topoemas, as happened in the poetry of the avant-garde movements, importance is given to the suggestive and expressive power of plastic images. There is no doubt that in Paz's late poetry there is a good deal of esotericism, but, apart from that, all his earlier poetry stands out for its lyricism and for the sense of transubstantiation the author gives to words.

Works

Poetry

• 1933 - Luna silvestre
• 1936 - ¡No pasarán!
• 1937 - Raíz del hombre
• 1937 - Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España
• 1941 - Entre la piedra y la flor
• 1942 - A la orilla del mundo y Primer día, Bajo tu clara sombra, Raíz del hombre, Noche de resurrecciones
• 1949 - Libertad bajo palabra
• 1951 - ¿Águila o sol? (prose)
• 1954 - Semillas para un himno
• 1956 - La hija de Rappaccini (dramatic poem)
• 1957 - Piedra de sol
• 1958 - La estación violenta
• 1960 - Libertad bajo palabra. Obra poética (1935-1957)
• 1962 - Salamandra (1958-1961)
• 1965 - Viento entero
• 1967 - Blanco, written in three columns; it allows different readings
• 1968 - Discos visuales, with Vicente Rojo
• 1969 - Ladera este (1962-1968)
• 1971 - Topoemas
• 1972 - Renga, with Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson
• 1974 - El mono gramático (prose)
• 1975 - Pasado en claro
• 1976 - Vuelta (there is a first handmade edition from 1971)
• 1979 - Air Born/Hijos del aire, with Charles Tomlinson
• 1979 - Poemas (1935-1975)
• 1987 - Árbol adentro
• 1990 - Obra poética (1935-1988)
• 1990 - Figuras y figuraciones, with Marie José Paz

Essays

• 1950 - El laberinto de la soledad (revised and expanded edition: 1959)
• 1956 - El arco y la lira (revised and expanded edition: 1967)
• 1957 - Las peras del olmo
• 1965 - Cuadrivio
• 1965 - Los signos en rotación
• 1966 - Puertas al campo
• 1967 - Corriente alterna
• 1967 - Claude Levi-Strauss o El nuevo festín de Esopo
• 1968 - Marcel Duchamp o El castillo de la pureza (expanded edition: Apariencia desnuda, 1973)
• 1969 - Conjunciones y disyunciones
• 1970 - Posdata, a continuation of El laberinto de la soledad.
• 1973 - El signo y el garabato
• 1974 - Los hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia
• 1974 - La búsqueda del comienzo. Escritos sobre el surrealismo
• 1978 - Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y obra
• 1979 - El ogro filantrópico
• 1979 - In/Mediaciones
• 1982 - Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe
• 1983 - Tiempo nublado
• 1983 - Sombras de obras
• 1984 - Hombres en su siglo y otros ensayos
• 1988 - Primeras letras (1931-1943) (anthology of his youthful prose)
• 1990 - Pequeña crónica de grandes días
• 1990 - La otra voz. Poesía y fin de siglo
• 1991 - Convergencias
• 1992 - Al paso
• 1993 - La llama doble
• 1993 - Itinerario
• 1994 - Un más allá erótico: Sade
• 1995 - Vislumbres de la India
• 1996 - Estrella de tres puntas. André Bretón y el surrealismo
• 2000 - Luis Buñuel. El doble arco de la belleza y de la rebeldía

Interviews

• 1973 - Solo a dos voces, with Julián Ríos
• 1985 - Pasión crítica, conversations with various interlocutors

Prologue

• 2002 - Por las sendas de la memoria. Prólogos a una obra (prefaces to the volumes of Paz's complete works, published by Galaxia Gutenberg and the Fondo de Cultura Económica)

Translation

• 1974 - Versiones y diversiones

Anthology

With other authors

• 1966 - Poesía en movimiento (with Homero Aridjis, Alí Chumacero and José Emilio Pacheco)

Of his work

• 1989 - Lo mejor de Octavio Paz. El fuego de cada día
• 2001 - Sueño en libertad. Escritos políticos
• 2009 - Un sol más vivo. Antología poética
• 2014 - Palabras en espiral (edited by Danubio Torres Fierro)

Correspondence

• 1998 - Correspondencia Alfonso Reyes/Octavio Paz (1939-1959)
• 1999 - Memorias y palabras: cartas a Pere Gimferrer (1966-1997)
• 2006 - Cartas cruzadas. Octavio Paz y Arnaldo Orfila (1965-1970)
• 2008 - Cartas a Tomás Segovia (1957-1985)
• 2008 - Jardines errantes. Cartas a J. C. Lambert (1952-1992)
• 2014 - Al calor de la amistad. Correspondencia con José Luis Martínez (1950-1984)
• 2017 - El tráfago del mundo. Cartas a Jaime García Terrés (1952 -1986)
• 2021 - Odi et amo. Las cartas a Helena
• 2021 - Esta carta está en tus manos [1935]. Cartas de amor de Octavio Paz a Elena Garro

Definitive edition of his complete works

Published in Spain, between 1999 and 2005, by Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de lectores; and in Mexico, in 2014, by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. Edition prepared by the author.

• I. La casa de la presencia. Poesía e historia
• II. Excursiones e incursiones. Dominio extranjero. Fundación y disidencia. Dominio hispánico
• III. Generaciones y semblanzas. Dominio mexicano. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o Las trampas de la fe
• IV. Los privilegios de la vista. Arte moderno universal. Arte de México
• V. El peregrino en su patria. Historia y política de México
• VI. Ideas y costumbres. La letra y el cetro. Usos y símbolos
• VII. Obra poética
• VIII. Miscelánea. Primeros escritos y entrevistas

Awards and honors

• Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation 1944
• Xavier Villaurrutia Award 1957 for El arco y la lira
• International Poetry Prize, Brussels, Belgium. 1963
• Member of El Colegio Nacional from August 1, 1967
• Prize of the Flanders Poetry Festival (shared with Jorge Guillén, Saint-John Perse, Leopoldo Sega and Giullia Yllyes) 1972
• Doctor Honoris Causa from Boston University 1973
• National Prize for Arts and Sciences in Linguistics and Literature 1977
• Jerusalem Prize 1977
• Spanish Critics' Prize, Barcelona. 1977
• National Prize for Letters, Mexico 1977.
• Publishers' Critics Prize, Spain 1977.
• Doctor Honoris Causa from the National Autonomous University of Mexico 1978
• Gran Águila de Oro Prize of the International Book Festival, Nice 1979
• Ollin Yoliztli Prize 1980
• Doctor Honoris Causa from Harvard University 1980
• Cervantes Prize 1981
• Neustadt International Prize for Literature 1982
• Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 1984
• Doctor Honoris Causa from New York University 1985
• Alfonso Reyes International Prize 1985
• Oslo Poetry Prize, Norway 1985
• Mazatlán Prize for Literature 1985 for Hombres en su siglo
• Menéndez Pelayo International Prize 1987
• Picasso Medal, awarded by UNESCO, Paris, France 1987
• Britannica Award, of the Encyclopædia Britannica, New York 1988
• Alexis de Tocqueville Prize, awarded by the French Academy 1989
• Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Murcia 1989
• Nobel Prize in Literature 1990
• Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic 1991
• Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Texas 1992
• Grand Cross of Merit 1993, Berlin
• Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 1993 to his magazine Vuelta
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor of France 1994
• Gabriela Mistral Medal, Santiago, Chile 1994
• Mariano de Cavia Journalism Prize, Madrid, Spain 1995
• Blanquerna Prize, Barcelona, Spain 1996
• Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Rome 1997
• Honorary member of the Mexican Academy of Language from August 26, 1997
• National Journalism Prize of Mexico 1998 in recognition of his career
• Medal of Citizen Merit of the Legislative Assembly of the Federal District (posthumous) 1998
• Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic 1998 (posthumous).
• Honorary “Nosotros” Golden Eagle Award 1998 (posthumous), Los Angeles.
• Mexican Cultural Institute Award 1999 (posthumous), Washington.

Bibliography

• Barrón Soto, Héctor Sx. La ideología poética del joven Paz. UNAM, Mexico, 1998.
• Castañón, Adolfo et al. Festejo: 80 años de Octavio Paz. Mexico, 1994. https://lccn.loc.gov/97184316
• Domínguez Michael, Christopher. Octavio paz en su siglo, Aguilar, 2014. https://lccn.loc.gov/2015469643
• Enciso, Froylán. Andar fronteras. El servicio diplomático de Octavio Paz en Francia (1946-1951), 2008. https://lccn.loc.gov/2010453525
• Fernández Cozman, Camilo. El cántaro y la ola: Una aproximación a la poética de Octavio Paz, 2004. http://roger.ucsd.edu/record=b5009435~S9
• García Viera, Abelardo M. Tránsito poético e intelectual de Octavio Paz, 1999. https://lccn.loc.gov/2003335289
• González, Javier. El cuerpo y la letra: La cosmología poética de Octavio Paz, 1990. https://lccn.loc.gov/91181788
• Hernández, Consuelo. "The Poetry of Octavio Paz". Library of Congress, 2008. https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-4329/
• Hernández, Consuelo. "El arte combinatoria en los poemas de Octavio Paz". El Nacional. September 25. C.2, 1982.
• Hernández, Consuelo. "Signos en rotación, una teoría poética." El Nacional. October 2, l982. C.2, 1982.
• Herrera, Karla I. Dos grandes latinoamericanos, 1999. https://lccn.loc.gov/00459360
• Krauze, Enrique. Redentores. Ideas y poder en América Latina. Mexico, Debate, 2011. The long chapter devoted to Paz was reissued as a standalone book in 2014 under the title Octavio Paz. El poeta y la revolución.
• Kwon Tae, Jung Kim. El elemento oriental en la poesía de Octavio Paz, 1989. https://lccn.loc.gov/90165719
• Mario Pinho. Volver al ser: Un acercamiento a la poética de Octavio Paz, 1997. https://lccn.loc.gov/94034711
• Medina, Rubén. Autor, autoridad y autorización: Escritura y poética de Octavio Paz, 1999. https://lccn.loc.gov/00278132
• Mendiola, Víctor Manuel. "El Surrealismo de ‘Piedra de sol’, entre peras y manzanas". FCE, 2011.
• Monsiváis, Carlos. A donde yo soy tú somos nosotros. Octavio Paz: crónica de vida y obra, 2000.
• Murillo González, Margarita. Polaridad-unidad: Caminos hacia Octavio Paz, 1987.
• Nettel, Guadalupe. Octavio Paz. Las palabras en libertad, Taurus, 2014.
• Ojeda, Jorge Arturo. La cabeza rota: La poética de Octavio Paz, 1983. https://lccn.loc.gov/85598899
• Perdigó, Luisa Marina. La estética de Octavio Paz. Madrid: Playor, 1975. https://lccn.loc.gov/75517602
• Perales Contreras, Jaime. Paz y Neruda: Historia de una amistad/Américas magazine (Organization of American States), July 2008.
• Peralta, Braulio. El poeta en su tierra. Diálogos con Octavio Paz. Mexico, 1996.
• Piña Zentella, Marta, Modelos geométricos en el ensayo de Octavio Paz, 2002.
• Piña Zentella, Marta, ¿Ausencia / Presencia? Ciudad en Octavio Paz, 2014.
• Poniatowska, Elena. Octavio Paz: las palabras del árbol, Plaza y Janés, Mexico, 1998.
• Ríos, Luis. Boletín Octavio Paz.
• Enrique Becerril, Publication date of the poem La Calle
• Ruy Sánchez, Alberto. Una introducción a Octavio Paz. Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014.
• Ruy Sánchez, Alberto. Octavio Paz: cuenta y canta la higuera, SM editores, 2014.
• Santí, Enrico Mario. El acto de las palabras: Estudios y diálogos con Octavio Paz, 1997.
• Santi, Enrico Mario. Luz espejeante, 2009.
• Salgado, Dante. Camino de ecos: Introducción a las ideas políticas de Octavio Paz, 2002.
• Salgado, Dante. Espiral de luz: Tiempo y amor en 'Piedra de sol' de Octavio Paz, 2003.
• Salgado, Dante, Ensayística de Octavio Paz, 2004.
• Salgado Dante, Octavio Paz: el amor como idea, 2010.
• Sheridan, Guillermo. Poeta con paisaje. Ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz, volume 1, Ediciones Era, Mexico, 2004.
• Sheridan, Guillermo. El filo del ideal: Octavio Paz en la guerra civil, Editorial Visor, Madrid, 2008.
• Sheridan, Guillermo. "Octavio Paz, editor de revistas", Letras Libres magazine, Mexico, 2008.
• Sheridan, Guillermo. Habitación con retratos. Ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz, volume 2, Ediciones Era, Mexico, 2004.
• Sheridan, Guillermo. Los idilios salvajes. Ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz, volume 3, Ediciones Era, Mexico, 2016.
• Stanton, Anthony. Las primeras voces del poeta Octavio Paz, 1931-1938, 2001.
• Ulacia, Manuel. El árbol milenario: Un recorrido por la obra de Octavio Paz, 1999.
• Vergara, Gloria. Visiones de Octavio Paz, 2008.

External links

• Zona Octavio Paz
• Nobel Prize page on Paz, laureate in 1990
• Adolfo Castañón. El poeta como revisor. Notas para la relectura de 'Pasado en claro' in Revista de la Universidad de México No. 51, May 2008
• Octavio Paz, VIDEOS of his life and work on Arte y Cultura TV
• Fonoteca Nacional launches La Estación Violenta, an internet radio station about the poet's work
• Page of the Enciclopedia de la Literatura en México where the videos of the programs México en la obra de Octavio Paz and Conversaciones con Octavio Paz, among others, recently released by Televisa, are available to the public
• Carlos Monsiváis A donde yo soy tú somos nosotros. Octavio Paz: crónica de vida y obra in Excentica on line.com
• Patricio Eufraccio Solano. Octavio Paz. El hombre y su obra in Repertorio de Ensayistas y Filósofos
• Works by and about Octavio Paz in the catalog of the German National Library
• Catalog of the Ibero-American Institute (Berlin): record 396908950
• Octavio Paz, Biografía y Obra on the website of the Coordinación Nacional de Literatura, INBA
• Review of Octavio Paz: El poeta y la revolución, Enrique Krauze, Mexican Studies/Estudios mexicanos (2015), 31 (1): 196—200
• Topic: Octavio Paz on the video platform YouTube
  • Octavio Paz in 1977, on the La 2 (TVE) program A fondo, with Joaquín Soler Serrano.
    • Presentation of the 1977 interview, by Soler Serrano himself, in 2001.
  • Octavio Paz on the TVE program Imprescindibles.