OCTAVIO PAZ: 1914-1998

By GABRIEL ZAID

hen Octavio Paz died last week at age 84, he was a world-famous poet and essayist, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature and proof that globalization can be a conversation. He believed in the universal conversation. He trusted that the best elements from every culture would survive and continue producing miracles.

He will be remembered as an innovative poet whose meditations were filled with powerful imagery, as an explorer of the root and soul of Mexican culture, as an insightful social and cultural critic and as an essayist with encyclopedic curiosity. Over his years of service as a Mexican diplomat, he went out of his way to learn about India and Japan and to understand the mentality of the U.S. While in Paris, he participated in French intellectual life, particularly in the surrealist movement. But Paz's roots were deeply Mexican. His grandfather fought against the French intervention in Mexico that brought Emperor Maximilian and Carlotta to power, occupied posts in government and founded an influential newspaper, La Patria. His father, who ran the paper, left his wife and four-month-old son to fight alongside Emiliano Zapata, acted as Zapata's secretary and later, relocating his wife and child, became Zapata's representative to the U.S.

That child spoke no English, and his cross-cultural awareness began with a shock. On the first day of kindergarten in Los Angeles, he was unable to eat his food because he didn't have a spoon. Asked in sign language what was wrong, he replied in Spanish, "Cuchara." The other kids mocked him until they came to blows. The culture shock was repeated when the family moved back to Mexico. His new schoolmates mistrusted the gringo child with light skin and blue eyes who had just arrived from the U.S. This sense of double rejection gave birth 30 years later to the meditations on Mexican identity of The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950).

Paz believed that the 1911 revolution would make Mexicans "contemporaneous with the rest of mankind." But principles mattered more than mere loyalty. While still a diplomat and an honored man of letters, he spoke out against his government's massacre of students in the Plaza de Tlatelolco. He left the diplomatic service to write and edit a literary journal, Plural, then founded another journal, Vuelta, which has played an important role in transforming the Mexican way of thinking.

Paz was not afraid to express unfashionable opinions, even when they brought disapproval in cultural circles. He followed no preconceived ideology, but rather his own sense of history, poetics and morality. In his youth he was attracted to the Communist Party but was repelled by the International Antifascist Writers Congress of 1937 in Valencia, where Andre Gide was condemned as a traitor for having written Retour de l'URRS. His final break with the communists came in 1939 when the Hitler-Stalin pact carved up Poland.

Paz was among the first critics of totalitarian regimes, and for this he was punished by a long campaign of calumny. As late as 1984, he was accorded the honor of being burned in effigy by pro-Sandinista mobs in Mexico. But Paz would not be silenced. He was 72 when he denounced a fraud perpetrated by the Mexican government in gubernatorial elections in Chihuahua.

His poetry gained him early recognition within the Spanish-speaking community and later around the world. Paz was a brilliant member of the vanguard of 20th century poetry, as expressed in Eagle or Sun? (1951), Sun Stone (1957), White (1967) and Renga (1971, with Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguinetti and Charles Tomlinson).

In his conversations, his letters, his poems, his essays, there is always a vivacity, a freedom, inventive and fresh. He was vastly learned; but whenever he spoke or wrote, he would let himself be drawn by inspiration, in the heat of the argument or the sweep of his writing, into the most startling connection or metaphor. All his learning and culture were brought to bear, not as dead weight but as vital sensibility. His creativity was never dampened by his erudition or power of analysis or historical perspective. On the contrary, they fed each other and spurred his creative and intellectual explorations.

Perhaps it was some perverse form of poetic justice that a man so graced had to face, like Job, a terrible trial. In December 1996, a fire destroyed part of his library and forced him out of his apartment. The library of his body was consumed by sickness: cancer of the spine forced him into a wheelchair and racked his body with pain. It left him gaunt and weak but did not silence him.

The last time he appeared in public was on Dec. 17, 1997, at the inauguration of the Octavio Paz Foundation. The day was overcast and gray. Octavio spoke of the sun, of gratitude and of grace. And the sun, as if engaged in conversation, peered down on him through the clouds.

Gabriel Zaid and Octavio Paz were co-founders of the literary journal Vuelta. Translated by Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush