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Biography of Octavio Paz
Name: Octavio Paz
Birth Date: March 31, 1914
Death Date: April 19, 1998
Place of Birth: Mexico City, Mexico
Nationality: Mexican
Gender: Male
Occupations: writer, diplomat, playwright, essayist
Octavio Paz
The Mexican diplomat, playwright, and essayist, Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was internationally regarded as one of the principal poets of the twentieth century. His work was formally recognized in 1990 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, the first Mexican to be so honored."Poetry," wrote Octavio Paz in El arco y la lira (The Bow and the Lyre), "is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation." According to Paz, poetry is a form of transcendence, removing the self from history and offering in its place a vision of pure or essential being and time. Poetry is sacred, providing salvation in a secular world.Paz was born March 31, 1914, to a distinguished Mexican family. His father, a lawyer from a mixed Spanish and Indian background, participated in the Mexican Revolution and was …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…of Paz's work is available in excellent English versions. Muriel Rukeyser was among his first translators, and her version of "Sun Stone" is itself a major poem. All of his poetry from 1957 to 1987 has been translated by Eliot Weinberger, and individual poems have been translated by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, and William Carlos Williams, among others. The two major collections in English are Early Poems: 1935-1955 (1973) and The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987 (1987), edited by Eliot Weinberger. The essential prose works include The Labyrinth of Solitude, translated by Lysander Kemp (1961), and The Bow and the Lyre, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms (1973). Paz generated a formidable amount of commentary in English as well as Spanish. See especially The Perpetual Present: The Poetry and Prose of Octavio Paz, edited by Ivar Ivask (1973) and Toward Octavio Paz: A Reading of His Major Poems, 1957-1976 by John M. Fein (1986).
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