ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Octavio Paz, Nobel laureate, India-lover, passes into the ages

Mexico's foremost literary figure Octavio Paz, who won a Nobel prize for his poetry and essays that mapped the labyrinths of the Mexican mind, has passed into the other world. He was 84.

Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo announced Paz's death early on Monday aboard his airplane while returning from the Summit of the Americas in Chile, Mexican News Media reported.

Zedillo did not give the cause of death or say when he died.

Soft-spoken, sometimes aloof to the point of scorn, Paz's style was sometimes harsh. But it was so precise and clear that he changed the very way Mexicans express themselves.

Like most Mexican writers, Paz was preoccupied with his country's many paradoxes and contradictions, its contrasts between an ancient Indian past and a more recent Spanish heritage, which gave rise to a culture that is often baffling even to Mexicans.

Even Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes -- one of Paz's sharpest critics -- conceded that he had forever changed the face of Mexican literature.

Phones rang unanswered early today at Paz's home. At the prestigious literary magazine Vuelta, which Paz founded, a security guard said he had not heard the news and there was no one was available to confirm it.

The clarity of Paz's writing inspired many other authors to abandon the convoluted style long common in Mexico.

Paz was born on March 31, 1914, and grew up on the edge of Mexico City. His grandfather, a strongly anti-clerical army general, playwright, lawyer, journalist and sometime revolutionary, was an ally of dictator Porfirio Diaz.

Paz's father and namesake, who called himself an Anarco- socialist, was secretary to Emiliano Zapata, the peasant leader of Mexico's 1910-1920 revolution. He later became a diplomatic representative to the United States of Zapata's revolutionary forces.

When Zapata was murdered in 1919, the Paz family went into brief exile in Los Angeles.

Back in Mexico, the family fell on hard times. When Paz was a teenager, the family was selling pieces of furniture and then the entire house -- to make ends meet.

Paz published his first poem when he was 16 and his first essay a year later. He went to law school at Mexico City's National Autonomous University, where he joined a Marxist student group.

He married a young writer, Elena Garro, and continued to write poems.

In his early 20s, Paz sent a manuscript to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who also would go on to win a Nobel prize. Neruda was so impressed with Paz that he wrote a favourable review and suggested the young Mexican go to a congress of anti-fascist writers in Spain.

In Madrid, Paz met other Leftist writers including Andre Malraux, Andre Gide, Stephen Spender, Antonio Machado and Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg.

Paz stayed in Spain after the congress and joined the Leftist- dominated Republican Forces fighting rightist General Francisco Franco. He insisted on going to the front.

He was sent to a brigade commanded by a Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros but was never given a rifle and, apparently because some doubted his Leftist credentials, was sent back to Mexico on a vague mission to divulge the Spanish cause.

Back in Mexico City, he worked at the El Popular, a socialist newspaper, but quit after political arguments with colleagues. From 1938 to 1940, he ran the magazine Taller (workshop), but became increasingly distanced from the Leftist movement.

Paz took a scholarship to study at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked in New York translating Hollywood scripts into Spanish.

A diplomat, impressed with his writing in the Mexican magazine Manana offered him a job as cultural attache to the embassy in Paris in 1946. He went on to work in the diplomatic service in Japan and the United States.

In 1968, Paz resigned as Mexico's ambassador to India when troops quashed student protests in Mexico City's Tlatelolco Square, killing hundreds of people.

Paz had frequent disagreements with the Leftist movement, equating Cuban President Fidel Castro with right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and calling Nicaragua's Leftist Sandinista revolution inconsequential.

But he also was a fierce critic of Mexico's government, denouncing the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party as corrupt and distanced from the Mexican people.

Paz denied he was anti-Leftist, although he admitted he had little use for Marxism. He called himself a social democrat.

In 1976, Paz founded Vuelta which would become one of Latin America's most prestigious literary magazines. He remained the magazine's director until his death.

He lived in a spacious and quiet apartment in a high-rise off one of Mexico City's busiest avenues, surrounded by thousands of books, mementos, pre-Columbian ceramics and art objects. Despite the pollution and noise, Paz refused to seek calmer surroundings in the suburbs.

UNI

EXTERNAL LINK:
In light of India

Tell us what you think of this report