by Octavio Paz
Hermandad / Brotherhood
OP: “In the Palatine Anthology there are two poems attributed to Ptolemy (VII, 314, and IX, 577). W. R. Paton declares that it is impossible to determine the identity of this Ptolemy, but Pierre Waltz and Guy Saury claim that it is probable that the second epigram was actually written by the great astronomer Claudius Ptolemy. In his poem there is an affirmation of the divinity and immortality of the soul that is clearly Platonic, yet at the same time it belongs to an astronomer familiar with the things of the sky. He says: ‘I know that I am mortal, but when I observe the circular motion of the multitudes of stars I no longer touch the earth with my feet; I sit next to Zeus himself and drink until I am sated the liquor of the gods—ambrosia.’ It is beautiful that for Ptolemy contemplation consists of drinking, with one’s eyes, immortality.”
OP: “When I said that someone spells me out, I was thinking, in the first place, of the brotherhood of life. I had come across a poem by Ptolemy, who wrote that he had been looking at a star and that vision had confirmed his belief in the immortality of the soul. Well, I can’t agree with him on that, but I believe that there is a brotherhood of life that continues with or without the individual. The star is a kind of writing in the sky that I try to decipher. Of course I don’t understand it; I can’t be God. Nevertheless, I try to spell it out and at the same time someone else is doing the same, whether on this planet or another. The poem refers to the brotherhood of man and a kind of communion with everything that is alive.” (interview, 1990)
Hablo de la ciudad / I Speak of the City
When Paz first gave me the manuscript of the poem, I remarked on its Whitmanesque title (as well as its long lines). He replied, “No, I was thinking of Langston Hughes: ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’”
Conversar / To Talk
to talk is divine: From a poem by the Portuguese poet Alberto Lacerda.
Cuatro chopos / The Four Poplars
The Monet painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Carta de creencia / Letter of Testimony
OP: “[The poem] has three parts. In the first, a voice—that of the man who writes—is talking to himself and to the images that evoke his writing: the beloved person. Monody. In the second part, other voices appear: polyphony. The distant voices of teachers and poets from the past: Plato, Dante, Cavalcanti, Lope de Vega, and others. Voices known and unknown. The voices bring back the theme of the first part: love, a word as equivocal as all words. The voices continue, argue with, turn around, and become intertwined with the first voice. Crisis. Variations on the two (the couple) and conclusion. Third part: monody. The first voice brings back the motif of the two: the couple in linear time and facing death. Not the moment outside of time or against time, as in earlier poems, but the succession of days. There is no Eden: we were expelled from the garden, to love is to walk through this world and through the ruins of the devastated years. Coda: to love is to learn to walk together, and also to learn how to be still, rooted, to turn into trees, like Philemon and Bauchis. To love is not to gaze at each other to the point of petrification, like Ferdinand and Miranda, but rather to look together out there: to take on the world, time, and death.” (interview, 1989)
Poems [1989–1996]
Estrofas para un jardín imaginario / Stanzas for an Imaginary Garden
The municipal government of Mexico City approached Paz with a proposal to build, in his childhood neighborhood of Mixcoac, a public garden whose gates and walls would be decorated with his poems. Mixcoac, once a charming village on the outskirts of the city, is now largely a desolate, anonymous corner of the spreading megalopolis. Paz designed the verbal plantings for the garden, but, after visiting the site, decided it was impossible: Mixcoac had become another world. His poems, then, became stanzas for an imaginary garden.
Respuesta y reconciliación / Response and Reconciliation
Paz’s last published poem. It appeared in the November 1996 issue of Vuelta.
OP: “For a while now, I’ve been devoting a good deal of my spare time to reading science books. A slow but passionate reading: it seems to me that these days science asks the questions that philosophy no longer does. Three subjects have interested me: the origins of the universe, of life, and of consciousness. The three are intimately related and the last two have their foundation in the first—that is to say, in traditional and quantum physics. One element that is common among the three: the notion of process, time. All of these phenomena are inscribed in time. One could even say, without exaggeration, that they are time. Since Einstein, time has been inseparable from physics and astronomy; in turn, biology is inexplicable without the theory of evolution, and the birth of consciousness is a moment, the most complex moment, in natural evolution. When one says time, one says the beginning, but also says the end. The Second Law of Thermodynamics has made us familiar with the inevitable end of the universe. And the beginning? Here we face a difficulty that has yet to be entirely resolved: What was there before the ‘big bang’?
“As I have tried to show in other writings . . . modern scientists, almost always without realizing it, sometimes come up with very old philosophical ideas to explain this or that. The question of the origin of the universe confronts us with a question as old as the philosophy of the pre-Socratics. In the case of the ‘big bang,’ there is only one answer, if we discard the intervention of a demiurge who pulled the cosmos out of nothing: the existence of a state before matter. That state has been called quantum fluctuation by some physicists—that is, a singularity that is not ruled by the laws of classic physics stated by Einstein. This theory immediately evokes the ancient Greek notion of an original chaos and, even more, the cosmology of the Stoics. They believed that the universe would end in a catastrophe—a great flame that would consume all the elements—in order to be reborn and recover the cohesion, the ‘sympathy’ that unites all the parts of the cosmos. Ideas that are not very far from the theory of quantum fluctuations as a state before the universe.
“I was thinking of all this when I suddenly remembered the first line of a famous sonnet by Quevedo: ‘Ah life! Does no one answer?’ The question was the same as I had been asking . . . and I instinctively began to write a response . . . though written, of course, from the perspective of our century. Quevedo’s sonnet refers only to death itself, and the swiftness with which time converts all the todays and tomorrows into yesterdays.
“The title of my poem is ‘Response and Reconciliation.’ I wrote it in December 1995, and I have been endlessly revising it in the months since. It is divided into three parts. In the first part, I emphasize the essential silence of life and of nature: it is we who speak for them. In the second part, time appears, the cradle and tomb of stars and men. In the third, I talk about how the movement of the universe, though its design or finality is not visible, does have a certain coherence, an implicit rationality. Many scientists think the same. Through those windows that are mathematics and science, but also poetry, music, and the arts, we can, at times, glimpse universal reason: the other face of time. The poem is a response to an ancient question and a reconciliation with our earthly fate.” (reading, May 22, 1996)
Copyright © 2004, 2012 by Marie José Paz, heir of Octavio Paz
Copyright © 1979, 1985, 1987, 1988 by Octavio Paz
Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990, 2006, 2012 by Eliot Weinberger
Copyright © 1965 by Denise Levertov
Copyright © 1968, 1981 by Octavio Paz and Charles Tomlinson
Copyright © 1970 by Octavio Paz and Paul Blackburn
Copyright © 1971 by Octavio Paz and Muriel Rukeyser
Copyright © 1971, 2012 by New Directions Publishing
Copyright © 1974 by Octavio Paz and Elizabeth Bishop
Copyright © 1979 by Editorial Seix Barral, S. A.
Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1978, 1979, 1986 by Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger
All rights reserved. Except for
brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published clothbound by New Directions in 2012 and as New Directions Paperbook 1400 in 2018 (isbn 978-0-8112-2756-8)
Design by Leslie Miller
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paz, Octavio, 1914–1998.
[Poems. English. Selections]
The poems of Octavio Paz / edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger with additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8112-2043-9 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1. Paz, Octavio, 1914–1998 —Translations into English. I. Weinberger, Eliot.
II. Title.
PQ7297.P285A2 2012
861'.62 — dc23 2012016228
eISBN: 9780811227575
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
