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By Robert Hass
April 26, 1998
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I was in San Miguel de Allende in January when I heard that Octavio Paz
was gravely ill. My hotel room had a rooftop patio. When I walked out
onto it at dawn, 6,000 feet up in the Sierra Madre, I looked out at a late
Renaissance dome, 18th-century church spires, laundry lines, utility lines,
black rooftop cats gazing with what seemed religious reverence at the
pigeons they could not quite reach, and in the distance the lines of low bare
hills that formed the high shallow valley of San Miguel. Overhead there was
a flock of what must have been two hundred cormorants flying silently and
swiftly north. In the dawn light it looked as if the white sky were full of
broken black crosses, a kind of aerial, fast-moving cemetery. It could have
been an image from one of his poems.
Paz, who died this week, was not only Mexico's greatest poet. He was
one of the most remarkable literary figures of this half century. His essays
are at least as compelling as his poems and a good way for English readers
to get to know him. Paz's great prose book is probably his stunning
meditation on the nature of poetry, The Bow and the Lyre, and there are
others: his book-length essay on Mexico and Mexican culture, The
Labyrinth of Solitude, his biographical study of Mexico's great poet of the
Colonial Period, Sor Juana de la Cruz, his essays on history and politics,
One Earth, Four or Five Worlds, and his essays on Mexican art. Only
Czeslaw Milosz among the poets of his generation has had the same depth
and range.
But he was a poet first of all. The best volumes of his work in English are
Selected Poems and A Tree Within, both published by New Directions.
Here is one of his poems, gorgeous in Spanish and you can almost hear the
original in this English translation by Mark Strand:
Wind and Water and Stone
The water hollowed the stone,
the wind dispersed the water,
the stone stopped the wind.
Water and wind and stone.
The wind sculpted the stone,
the stone is a cup of water,
The water runs off and is wind.
Stone and wind and water.
The wind sings in its turnings,
the water murmurs as it goes,
the motionless stone is quiet.
Wind and water and stone.
One is the other and is neither:
among their empty names
they pass and disappear,
water and stone and wind.
("Wind and Water and Stone" by Octavio Paz, translated by Mark Strand,
from "The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987." Copyright 1979
by The New Yorker Magazine. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corp.)
Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author, most
recently, of the collection "Sun Under Wood."
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