Everett Larson: Good afternoon. I'm Everett Larson; I'm representing the Hispanic Division here, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this symposium sponsored by the Embassy of Mexico. The Mexican Cultural Institute whose Director, Juan Garcia Delsoy [ spelled phonetically ] is here with us today. The Hispanic Division also, and the poetry office in honor of the Mexican Noble Laureate Octavio Paz, you know that though. A remarkable writer, thinker, and political voice -- you knew that also -- he left us just 10 years ago, although it seems so much longer. First it's my great honor and privilege to introduce to you the current Ambassador of Mexico to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan. Ambassador Sarukhan graduated from the [ Spanish ] of Mexico with a degree in International relations and received a Master's Degree in U.S. Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS at Johns Hopkins here. He's served in different posts in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs among which as Counsel General in New York City, a position he left in February 2006 to join Philipe Calderone's successful presidential campaign as coordinator of foreign affairs and foreign policy. He was appointed Ambassador to the United States in January 2007. Ambassador Sarukhan. [ applause ] Arturo Sarukhan: Good afternoon. Thank you for your introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, dear Barbara, I would like to welcome you to this symposium and tribute to the Mexican poet and essayist, Octavio Paz. The second in a series that began yesterday in New York City and I would like to particularly thank the Library of Congress for generously hosting this afternoon's symposium at the Mumford Room and especially Dr. Dorn and Dr. Tennebaum [ spelled phonetically ] whose efforts were central to the realization of today's program. Ten years ago the literary, cultural, and artistic worlds deeply mourned the loss of Octavio Paz. With his death the Western world lost one of its last great [ unintelligible ] in the true encyclopedia sense of the word. We lost a poet who took part in the historic international congress of anti-fascist writers of Valencia in 1937, a playwright, promoter, and even agitator of the poetry out loud [ Spanish ] group in the 1950s; a diligent Mexican diplomat first in the consulate San Francisco and New York City and later on as Ambassador of Mexico to India in the 1960s; a founder and director of two of the most important Spanish speaking literary magazines of our time, Plural and Vuelta in the 1970s; an ardent speaker against human rights violations in communist countries, an insightful thinker who foresaw the close relationship between poetry and technology; an insidious disseminator of 20th century American poetry through his voluminous translations; a man who had the forthright and the strength and the fortitude to resign as Ambassador of Mexico after the 1968 [ Spanish ] massacres in my country. Octavio Paz was as indispensable in the public sphere as he was in the literary world. The recipients of the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature, he was an eloquent defender of liberty, democracy, and tolerance, cornerstones of the ethics and aesthetics of the modern intellectual. From a very young age, Paz identified and lived by the principle that only through an open dialogue could man, cultures, and nations come to a common understanding and communion especially in an age where nakedness and defenselessness are awaiting us as he wrote in The Labyrinth of Solitude [ Spanish ] . [ Laughs ] And now I'm having problems translating back into Spanish. [ laughter ] "But there in that open solitude," continues Paz, "transcendence is also waiting. The outstretched hands of the solitary beings, for the first time in our history, we are contemporaries of all mankind. Ladies and gentlemen, so that I can be I must be another, I must leave myself and seek myself among others," so wrote Octavio Paz in his famous poem "Sunstone." Like Paz himself, Mexico must also leave itself to find its full existence among all the nations. Our cultural heritage and the vitality of our society will only reach the full expression if they transcend our borders and belong to everyone, if they are set in an open and inclusive horizon. I can think of few Mexicans who've contributed as much as Octavio Paz to this cosmopolitan endeavor. As a diplomat he was no doubt a good ambassador, but as a writer he is probably the best ambassador Mexico's ever had. Much of Mexico's international reputation has built primarily on its cultural and artistic vitality, and Octavio Paz is no doubt responsible for much of this prestige both as an artist himself and as an interpreter and translator of the works of other artists. The life and work of Octavio Paz has taught us not only to read the world, but also to fully and responsibly live in it, striving to achieve the delicate balance between beauty and truth that he achieved in his work. A balance between reality and desire as the Spanish poet [ Spanish ] would say. I am confident that this symposium will provide us with an insightful glimpse of what Paz called "freedom through the world," a freedom that offers a much needed bridge of understanding between men in a world in which Paz was surely right, we are for the first time in history contemporaries of all mankind. Thank you very much, [ Spanish ] . [ applause ] Everett Larson: Thank you very much, Ambassador Sarukhan. Our first speaker will be the distinguished writer and scholar Enrico Mario Santi. Professor Santi holds the William P. Byron endowed chair in Hispanic studies at the University of Kentucky. He taught previously at Cornell and Georgetown Universities and at the University of Miami where he held the Emilio Bacardi chair in Cuban studies. He's the author of many books in literary criticism focusing on Latin American literature. Dr. Santi will give us an overview of the various stages and characteristics of Paz's unique literary style. Professor Santi. Enrico Mario Santi: Thank you very much. Good afternoon. I'm especially moved to be here this afternoon because I used to live in D.C. I used to be a professor at Georgetown, and the Library of Congress was one of my homes. You know professors do research all the time and so libraries are the second home of professors, so I'm very, very pleased to be here. I'm also gratified to be among former students and former colleagues and good friends like Barbara Tannenbaum and Everett Larson. I think there's a mistake in the program because they're not three papers, there were four because Ambassador Sarukhan's paper was very moving and very well-written and knows a very intimate knowledge -- shows a very intimate knowledge of Octavio Paz so thank you so much. And of course I'd like to thank again the Mexican Cultural Institute for organizing this event both in New York City where we were yesterday and here in D.C. And I'd like especially to mention my friends [ Spanish ] , and [ Spanish ] of course and [ Spanish ] who is the Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute in New York City as well as Ambassador Sarukhan for working so diligently in making this event possible. And last but not least, I'd like to say how delighted I am to share this podium with my two highly respected colleagues Professor Evan Guerniea and professor and poet [ Spanish ] . I want you to listen very intently to this statement by Octavio Paz, and I'm going to say it first in Spanish and then in English. [ Spanish ] . "Wish me one minute a thousand years lived intensely." He said that on the occasion of his 80th birthday 14 years ago in New York City in an interview for television. Well, you might say that I've lost my mind, but this evening I'd like to share with you why I believe that the entirety, that is the sum total of Octavio Paz's life and work is contained within that one statement. They say [ Spanish ] , wish me one minute a thousand years lived intensely. So let me begin by saying this, as a young man between the ages of 17 and 29, Octavio Paz was a poet in search of a cause. He found that cause successively in philosophy, revolution, particularly the Communist movement, physical erotic love and, of course, in poems. He had grown up in a family of Mexican writers amidst the political, moral, and financial decadence forced upon them by the [ unintelligible ] demise and the violence of the Mexican revolution. Like Don Quixote, he sallied repeatedly [ Spanish ] , to become a teacher to the proletariat; to Spain during its Civil War to defend the Republic; to Berkeley before the hippies to find himself. Before leaving Mexico in 1943 he felt something else. He felt that Mexico had left him. He fought with everybody or so it seemed or he felt. He fought with his former Cuban Communist friends who continued to pray for Stalin. He fought with [ unintelligible ] whom he punched when they both got drunk. [ laughter ] He fought with his wife who started feeling the strain of two young a marriage. The searcher, you see, had changed over time, because so had the cause; or was it the other way around? When I met him toward the end of his life and at the beginning of my moral education, he once told me, "You don't choose the cause; the cause chooses you." Dissolution followed dissolution. From a lonely young man, he became a lonely man. He lived for a while in this, in New York City not far from we remembered him last night. He taught in New England at the same school where I happen to be teaching this very summer and hated it. I hope I don't. He left for Paris after the big war in part because he got a great job, his first real [ Spanish word ] , in part because he thought the real revolution, the definitive triumph of workers who were both capitalism and communism would take place there, in Paris led by the [ unintelligible ] realists and young converts like him. He preferred [ unintelligible ] over Sartre, [ unintelligible name ] over Picasso and became so horrified of the fresh booms of the Soviet [ unintelligible ] that he translated into Spanish the text that reported it though his friends back in Mexico later refused to publish them. Summers he would travel, sometimes with his family, many times by himself. Or else he would write like that summer in 1948 when alone and now desperate to return to Mexico, he wrote a kind of spiritual autobiography. It's titled El Laberinto de la Soledad, which in English would be translated as "The Labyrinth of Loneliness." But instead of returning west they sent him east, first to India which back then he found fascinating, but scary, then to Japan where he was horrified of the devastation of the World War. In Tokyo he lived in a tiny hotel room, which he shared with wife and child and at one time even thought of committing suicide. We leave; they all return to Europe briefly and after that to Mexico where instead of finding the splash, he was hoping for having his book published El Laberinto de la Soledad, he found a mixture of disdain and indifference. " [ Spanish ] nobody, [ Spanish ] is the blankness in our looks, the pulses in our conversation, the reserve in our silences." Mexico you see had proved his book right and the book had confirmed his worst fears. No sooner did he return to Mexico that he wanted to leave again. But while there he worked intensely. He joined a theater group. He began to translate poetry from English, French, even Japanese and loved it. He wanted to start a magazine or a journal, anything to tell the world how unhappy he was, but didn't. He fell in and out of love several times and in the end divorced his wife. Shortly before that in '57 he wrote, "Sunstone" [ Spanish ] , his first major poem and perhaps the greatest poem ever written about love and the clearest statement about his deepest sorrow. "There is nothing inside me but a large wound, a hollow place where no one goes, a windowless presence. A thought that returns and repeats itself, reflects itself and loses itself in its own transparency." He left Mexico again, or was he taken out? In Paris where he took refuge his prose-style changed radically. He became a major critic. The book that shows this is called, Alternating Current. He discovered structuralism, contemporary painting starting with Duchene [ spelled phonetically ] who never went, never goes out of style. He translated for [ unintelligible name ] one of his secret doubles. Almost got married for the second time and then got transferred, not by choice incidentally, to Delhi where he had once felt he would be devoured by Cali [ spelled phonetically ] the black goddess. In India he traveled far and wide mostly to the Indian south. He hunted for tigers. He started to practice yoga and I am convinced he tried several drugs. Quite possibly he also participated, I believe, in tantric sex rituals. Most of all he fell in love with the love of his life, [ unintelligible name ] who became his muse, his companion, his accomplice. And then they got married each for the second and last time. Word got out there -- word got out that there was, what today we'd call a cool Mexican dude way out in New Delhi who was writing about all these strange things: drugs, sex, et cetera. It was almost 1968, and the world came knocking, Julio [ unintelligible ] , John Cage [ spelled phonetically ] , John Garrett Galbreath [ spelled phonetically ] , even Andre Melro [ spelled phonetically ] visited the Mexican embassy, besides the Mexican embassy in India was big and beautiful. And if you go to You Tube today you can see a video of Octavio and Julio Portasa [ spelled phonetically ] doing a spring festivity dancing with a group of natives and doing what looks like the Indian equivalent of the Macarena. [ laughter ] And then came 1968. In May student protesters started writing poetry on the walls of Paris. In Chicago a political convention ended like a scene from the Keystone Cops. In Prague, Soviet tanks rolled in and [ unintelligible ] among other dissident intellectuals had to start learning French. In Mexico City, in the middle of the Olympics, the cops and the army managed to assassinate close to 300 people. Forty years later, we don't know still exactly how many died, or who did it, or who ordered it, or who should pay for it. In Delhi, the cool Mexican dude got word. He was getting the government reports by telex and was writing back urgent, patience, caution, restraint, dialogue, conversation and then he was not only worried, he was shocked. He got the great news through the BBC on a short-wave radio one weekend at a mountain retreat. And finally he became very angry. In protest he resigned his job and said so publicly. Up until October '68 Octavio was a world-class poet. Seven years before he had gotten what was then the biggest prize for poetry in Belgium. After '68, he became a world-class public intellectual who refused complicity with official murder. They left Delhi in a rush and returned to Paris in the middle of the scandal following the massacres, his public resignation, the published interviews where he literally criticized his former boss the President of Mexico. But President [ unintelligible ] and possibly [ unintelligible ] who became his successor had ordered to shut them up at all costs. The government tried to poo-poo his resignation and they said that he'd actually been fired. The Mexican ambassador in Paris even looked into suing him in the French courts for defamation, but the attorney the embassy hired advised against it and cited the same caution that someone had said about Joe Porsalta [ spelled phonetically ] the previous May. You just don't arrest Victor Hugo [ spelled phonetically ] . [ laughter ] For the first time in a long time, Octavio Paz was out of a job. There are letters to George Stiner, [ spelled phonetically ] to his translators in the states, to his French friends, some of them desperate begging them to find him something, anything, anything he could do. His retirement from 25 years in the Foreign Service wasn't going to go through any time soon, and he had to hunker down. Pittsburgh, UT Austin, then Cambridge, the real one in Britain hired him on the spot though he refused tenure. Octavio was as you can see a very smart man. In Texas, he analyzed what had happened in Mexico a year before and concluded that that had been a ritual sacrifice, much like the ones that the Aztecs sitting atop their pyramids, the massacre had taken place at [ unintelligible ] Square had performed in order to justify and assure their power. The new parapet was [ unintelligible ] , the new victims the massacred 300 some people and the new religion was ideological intolerance. In Delhi, in Paris, at Pitt, at UT, and even in Cambridge later Octavio started writing letters to people like [ Spanish ] urging them all to join him in starting another magazine, always the magazines, vehicles for change. The future [ Spanish ] , the magazine Paz started and are seldom heard to open the Mexican political system -- I know what you're all thinking, but remember Albert Einstein "Everything is relative" -- these journals became a reality when Paz returned in '71. The new public figure became even more public. Mexico City at that time had become a monster and this was the new shock. [ Spanish ] was now [ Spanish ] , smog, traffic, overpopulation, crime. Everything we cynically claim we love about our cities had taken over, and the poems he wrote and collected in [ unintelligible ] book not the journal showed the extent of that shock. He started shuffling back and forth between the DF [ spelled phonetically ] and Cambridge, the unreal one up there by the Charles River. [ laughter ] I can't help it I'm a Yalee. And gave it some reality by giving the Norton lecture some poetry, what soon became that indispensable book Children of the Mire. At Harvard he met all those who before '68 had never made it to Delhi [ Spanish ] , Joseph Broadsky [ spelled phonetically ] , Elizabeth Bishop, Danielle Bell [ spelled phonetically ] , John Womack [ spelled phonetically ] . And he fired them up to start writing for Plural and later Vuelta. Plural folded after barely three years, shut down by the [ unintelligible ] government, that pyramid again. But the poet who never walked away from a fight, getting by with a little help from his friends, and private money soon replaced it with Vuelta. It went on to last a quarter century. The world started finding out who Octavio Paz was. The prizes and awards started piling up, and I won't bore you with a list. And besides you know what they were. I met him in 1982. I was then 32; he was 68 in the DF, the summer I started reading him seriously for a book I was then writing and later dropped. That day I was very nervous, and I was very scared. How could I possibly dare to call Octavio Paz and ask him to see me? We talked like old friends, at least I want to remember it like that. We talked about his latest book then unpublished [ Spanish ] or The Traps of Faith, a biography that is also an autobiography. [ Spanish ] he used to claim. And we talked about Cuba, where I'm from, and about Mexico, its intellectual elite. "Full of [ Spanish ] revolutionaries," he said. And then we talked about him, about the lonely young man's search of a cause and whose early writings then all dispersed in journals and newspapers that he had never collected before. And I had spent that whole summer gathering together and was studying. And then he said, [ Spanish ] , "But all that happened a thousand years ago." [ Spanish ] , "Seems only yesterday," he added quickly. So for me ladies and gentlemen, that day I met the poet and today when I remember him is the same day. That's why I say that all Octavio Paz is summed up in that statement, " [ Spanish ] a thousand years lived intensely." Isn't that what has just happened, now? Aren't our lives but a moment in time? I realize of course that I haven't talked about many things concerning Octavio Paz. About the day in Mexico City when he was burned in effigy next to the [ unintelligible ] for giving his opinion on a public political matter. About the [ Spanish ] about the Nobel Prize in 1990, or about his illness, or about his death. But at this point I feel that the rest, as they say is history. Fourteen years ago I stood up in the same symposium along with another group of writers and scholars in New York City, all Octavio Paz's friends and spoke about him and his work. This evening in D.C., this day is no different from that day. All the days are one day; all the moments are single moments. A single intense moment is worth 1,000 days. There is no such thing as time. The present is motionless, for those in memorable line in the poem. [ Spanish ] Towards the end of [ Spanish ] , "Sunstone," as the poem speaker gets ready to wrap up his circuitous journey through his several lives and loves, he returns to what he calls the moment and ink stamped it, all the moments, each worth, in fact, 1,000 years. And I cite those lines now from Eliot Weinberger's splendid translation which reads: I want to go on, to go further, and cannot: as each moment was dropping into another I dreamt the dreams of dreamless stones, and there at the end of the years like stones I heard my blood, singing in its prison, and the sea sang with a murmur of light, one by one the walls gave way, all of the doors were broken down, and the sun came bursting through my forehead, it tore apart my closed lids, cut loose my being from its wrappers, and pulled me out of myself to wake me from this animal sleep and its centuries of stone, and the sun's magic of mirrors revived a crystal willow, a poplar of water, a tall fountain the wind arches over, a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still, a course of a river that turns, moves on, doubles back, and comes full circle, forever arriving. Thanks. [ applause ] Everett Larson: Thank you, Professor Santi. Our next speaker will be Yvon Grenier [ spelled phonetically ] of St. Francis University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he's professor and chair of political science. He's written several books on Octavio Paz including, From Art to Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom and its Spanish translation. Professor Grenier edited and wrote the introduction to Octavio Paz [ Spanish ] , for which he was awarded the prize for essays from the Octavio Paz Foundation. Professor Grenier will discuss Paz's vision of politics and literature. The close relationship between modern intellectuals or [ Spanish ] and political liberalism. Dr. Grenier. Yvon Grenier: Thank you very much. Well, first of all I think I need to express my gratitude to the Mexican Cultural Institute for giving me this opportunity to be here tonight. I'm very pleased and of course I'm very honored. I'm also very honored to share the stage with my friends and colleagues, [ Spanish ] as well as [ Spanish ] , who are obviously my masters in some respects. I am of course deficient in my understanding of Paz because I'm a political scientist, and nobody's perfect. [ laughter ] And so the literary part is one that fascinates me, but one that of course I'm not particularly competent to discuss. It's always a great pleasure for me to meet with those colleagues, those real specialists of Paz. What I'm interested in, really, is the political part of Paz. I'm a political scientist and basically I thought that my contribution tonight in those only few minutes I have is, would be best if rather than just going through the chronology of Paz saying this, Paz saying that, being involved in this or that fight, I'd rather try to answer a simple question. Why is it that Octavio Paz is, in my view, an important political thinker of the 20th century? Paz of course was a very well-known public intellectual who was born in a very political family who spent a quarter of a century in public service -- in Foreign Service, I mean who took part in probably all of the major political debates of his time so you may, you know the first part of answer seems easy enough. Yeah, of course, he was very involved in politics; everybody knows that. But Paz was first and foremost a poet and perhaps a cultural theorist [ Spanish ] . So politics is secondary in his [ unintelligible ] . Paz, himself had modest views of his contribution to political thought. Here's a quote which I will read in Spanish. I haven't translated it. One that I think captures very well his own views of his contribution. He says, [ Spanish ] , So why study Octavio Paz political thought then? Well one could say he wrote so extensively, beautiful, well-crafted articles, very judicious, well informed about the topics of the time, but that's not where I want to go today. What I want to propose here is that it is important to read him because he's offering us something unique, and that is a poet's perspectives on politics, okay? Reading Paz reminds us that the roots of politics broadly defined are to be found outside of politics narrowly defined. They are to be found in the human experience more generally with its historical, philosophical, cultural, mythological, and obviously poetic dimensions. Paz may very well be right about how circumstantial his political articles are, and here I'm sure he's thinking about articles in [ Spanish ] or in newspapers about the elections about something happening in the world or in Mexico. But I think that it's important not to forget that his most enduring text on politics are the ones in which politics is only one ingredient among others. And here I'm thinking about texts that are not obviously, or automatically, primarily political: texts on modernity and the connections between art and politics, on the [ Spanish ] , on certain thinkers and artists that he admired, [ foreign language ] , [ unintelligible ] . So many in fact, articles of his on individuals or on themes, not a primarily political but with a very important political content. It is hard and perhaps not a good idea, actually, to separate the political articles from the essays more generally and then to separate the essays more generally from the poetry, okay? Paz was born in politics, and his political views were decisively shaped by the two political orientations of the Paz family: the liberal and the revolutionary. But his unique perspective stems more fundamentally from the connection he makes between three elements: poetry, freedom, and then politics. I'm quoting him again. [ Spanish ] . Paz's commitment to politics is a moral commitment, not primarily an ideological commitment and let alone a Partisan commitment. His political/moral commitment involves certain defending. Defending fighting for certain values. And the most important of which being of course, freedom. Now freedom is not exclusively and maybe not even primarily a political value. Freedom existed before democracy. And Paz of course was a strong advocate of democracy in his country and abroad, at least since [ Spanish ] in '69, he proclaimed that no durable solutions to the problems facing Mexico could be found without democracy. He was not saying democracy is the solution; democracy is a tool that you need in order to find solutions. Ultimately, freedom of expression makes something more important possible, the expression of freedom and the maximum rendition of which being art and poetry. The connection between the poet's perspective and democracy is far from evident. Imagination is a form of irresponsibility. And a quest for freedom in art is not automatically convertible to political views that nurture freedom. We know of too many examples of great artists, or great thinkers, great philosophers of the 20th century who espoused totalitarian regimes, totalitarian ideas. We know of cases of writers who are very subtle and love ambiguity and paradoxes in their work and become completely one sided in their politics, you know, as if they were resting when they're thinking about politics, like politics is the weekend of literature. [ laughter ] Right? The logic of art is very different from the logic of politics. Art is the realm of questions, you know or the wisdom of uncertainty, yes? [ Spanish ] . Politics is the real defenders. Art and politics can mix well and I think there's no way the artist can completely separate himself/herself from politics. But from an artistic vantage point or point of view, it is very important for art to remain on top. And art can be a school for freedom in politics only if passion is tempered by reason. And I think Paz is showing us an interesting example of that tension, which is never completely resolved, but it's a sort of balance. It's an equilibrium between the passion and reason, the passion perhaps in art and more reason in politics as a dominant value, not only reason in one and only passion in the other, but as a dominant value. Looking back at his political itinerary, one could be forgiven to think that Paz was ahead of his time. After all on democracy in Mexico and abroad, on the nature of totalitarianism, even on gender issues, on environmental issues, on globalization, on many of the themes that seem to keep busy all the post-modern theorists nowadays, you know, the crisis of the subject and then the grand narrative and all these things, Paz had been talking about this for decades before it became sort of textbook material on North American campuses. But the expression "ahead of his time" wouldn't be very Pazian because he always fought against this idea of the linear time and ideology of progress, and we're all in the train with vagans [ spelled phonetically ] , and we're all heading in the same direction. Often in his remarks on Marxism he would say "I'm not opposed to Marxism; I'm opposed to the idea of historical determinism," which is present in Marxism, but also another ideology. So what would he be saying then if he would not accept this idea of being ahead of his time? I think he would rather say that he wanted to be with his contemporaries accompanying them in their journey. As he once said, "The point is not to change man, but to be one of them." And, ultimately, as he once said rather than searching for a way to colonize the future and be ahead all the time, what is more important, more challenging, more interesting is to look for the present time and to see how it can be reconciled with a certain idea of the future, which include death and the past. In what way would a poetic vision of politics be different than a political vision of politics? I tried to explain something like this to my colleagues and political scientists, and they start looking at their watch pretty fast, you know. [ laughter ] They think that I would suggest it means we should all start writing poems on the [ unintelligible ] or something, you know? On verses on the U.N. or automatic writing on -- I don't know -- globalization or something. I already said it's important to integrate culture, myth, and all that, but here I'm thinking about something else. I'm thinking about how a poetic vision of politics allows one, and allowed him, to find a plurality of significations in the phenomena he examined. Paradoxes in contradictions, rather than scaring him, rather than being seen as something that needs to be cut in squares or gotten rid of became little gold mines for him brimming with forgotten and neglected meaning. He was an advocate of reason, son of the enlightenment, yet also very critical of reason. He criticized all what he called the [ Spanish ] , the first of which being religion, the lesser of which being ideology. But he wrote very respectfully about religion as a repair to our civilization and tradition and culture, very, very important. He said at some point something interesting about evil, that religion had almost a monopoly in really trying to find out what evil is. [ Spanish ] . Very critical of nationalism, yet he celebrated at [ Spanish ] in advocated solutions such as confederations for the Americas, just like [ unintelligible ] did for Europe. He talked about [ Spanish ] also quite early. In looking at religion, often he would be interested in its philosophical underpinnings. Looking at an anesthetic perspectives, surrealism for instance, you know, great surrealist poet and yet he would say but I admire [ unintelligible ] so much. But I disagree with him on [ Spanish ] . At the end he would say what do you agree with? [ laughter ] Exactly. What is spiritual and ethical drive? That's what he agreed with. He looks at Cervantes and immediately sees his [ unintelligible ] the incipient liberal perspective in Cervantes, you know. Looking at his own political dispositions, he was inspired by the enlightenment, but also by its nemesis, romanticism. By liberalism and by socialism and between liberalism and socialism no contradictions only [ Spanish ] as he said. And if I say that to my colleagues again, they like it. But what do you do with that exactly? [ laughter ] And maybe they're not completely wrong although I like to think they're all wrong and I'm right of course, but why because there are certain things that you demonstrate and other things that you show [ Spanish ] rather than [ Spanish ] . And often just by putting the right finger at the right place, you sort of release the tension and you suddenly allow people to go in and maybe look for meanings that have been neglected. And that's an example of how a poetic perspective on politics will not replace a political perspective on politics, but could add to it, could bring something new to it, right? On the pre, for instance, in political science for the longest period of time you had literature saying you're democratic, or you're not democratic, or you're swinging in between somewhere. You're in transition. Huge literature on transition from one to the other and only recently have you seen many books on dominant party system talking about, no there is a strange but sweet generous beast if you can call it, dominant party system with an authoritarian version, but also a democratic one, like Italy or Japan for instance, where you have one party that happens to win all the time because it is not completely fair. But it is not completely unfair either. And a lot of the texts that wrote -- Paz wrote or had completed many others go in that direction. That there is something about the [ unintelligible ] that you should sort of think outside of the box and try to see that the actual original nature of that region. And he talks at some point about the human [ foreign language ] . And it's something that, again, you can, you couldn't see in the literature of the times of political science but you see now. Paz is very slippery for anyone thinking in rigid, ideological categories. And perhaps the closer you are the more difficult it is not to think in rigid, ideological categories. And perhaps again for this reason it's easier to appreciate the different layers of meaning if you step back in time or even in space. You know, like, I like to think that, you know, I think it's a great Canadian MacLean [ spelled phonetically ] who said once that only the fish don't know they're underwater. You know and often, an author if you step back, if you come from a different back ground, you can perhaps not see it better, but see it differently. The -- Paz was a romantic who criticized materialism and reason, but he was also a liberal who championed freedom and democracy, as well as a conservative who treasured certain traditions, and finally a socialist who lamented the erosion of fraternity and equality. An advocate of fundamental transformation in the way we see ourselves in modern society, he was a promoter of incremental change, not revolution. Now ignore if Paz could have found the exit to all these labyrinths, if he could have managed to be so successful with his poetic visions of politics, if he had not been such a good writer. You need to be a good writer and, you know, social scientists are not very good writers. In humanities it used to be but now it seemed to be a flaw if you write well in humanities. So obviously, it helped him, and I have a quote here which I find really a good example, it's not completely political but for the same reason I explained before, I think there's a political dimension he's trying to explain, you know, basically who is the I, who is the one person speaking versus the environment and how one influences the other. And he says [ Spanish ] . See, it's beautiful. Now the point here for him, it's not merely to be, to play with words or to be brilliant, you know, but rather to explore the compatibility of opposites, to dissolve the edges, and to introduce some fluidity in the way we understand the human experience. In politics, in political science and in politics more generally the tendency is the opposite. There is a very strong binary bias in politics. Everything has to be either/or. Or end up sooner or later being sort of framed into an either/or pattern, and that's the way politics work. You know we have the left verses the right and the north verses the south and the west verses the east and then once you're short of terms to organize everything in pairs like this, what you have is plebiscites you know, you're for or against globalization. You're for or against this or that social policy. Like, there's this tendency to have these two boxes all the time and if there is a third element you know, like Paz has beautiful paragraphs on the great slogan of the French Revolution, "Liberty, [ French ] ." But this they decided to erase after a while, it sort of spoiled the party, you know, or like introduce an element of [ French ] . So what he said is we forgot one, we forgot fraternity. You know, we have equality you know for socialism and liberty for liberalism. Fraternity may be bit nationalism, but it's very thin. It's not something with real content it could change from one place to the other. So he's looking for a third and then the fourth and the fifth and a thousand and like why should it be two. Why should it be one against the other? So I think that that's another reason why I think a poetic visions can introduce a bit more breathing space in the way we think about politics. The -- finally I'm getting to the end. I think my time is almost up. What we have in Paz is, of course, as most of you know who have read him, is sort of an oceanic [ unintelligible ] about all kinds of things, politics, history and so on and so forth. But for me, what is most important is that in Paz what you find is way of thinking [ foreign language ] , you know? You know, he's not giving us a fish; he's showing us how to go fishing. And from his defense of poetry, and his courageous defense of freedom, his defense of democracy, I think we can also draw another lesson which is not only [ foreign language ] but also a way to live, [ foreign language ] , fighting for what you think is important. And on that last word I thank you very much, muchas gracias, for your attention. Thank you. [ applause ] Thank you very much. Everett Larson: Our closing speaker will be Consuelo Hernandez. Professor Hernandez [ foreign language ] as well as a literary critic is a professor of Latin American Studies at American University. She has written more than 40 works on Latin American Poetry including two essays on Octavio Paz. Her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies in Latin America, Spain, Canada and in the United States. She'll speak to us today on the nature and the universe in Paz poetry and his vision of language. Professor Hernandez. [ applause ] Consuelo Hernandez: Thank you, Dr. Larson, and thank you for being here in this beautiful day. I want to extend my thanks also the Embassy of Mexico, to the Mexican Cultural Institute, to the Library of Congress, and I'm very glad to share here this afternoon with my colleagues Enrico Santi and Yvon Grenier. So I am going to talk about Paz's poetry and let's see. In 1989 during the author's week that was devoted to Octavio Paz in Madrid, he states these words. "After hearing these young poets, it seems to me that they are inventing another Octavio Paz, truly and real. I couldn't really tell if they were talking about me or they were talking about someone else." But at another point, Paz indicated what has been most pressing to me is that this has not been a homage but rather a conversation about what I have written. This afternoon, almost 20 years later, I wish to join the conversation in which Paz recognized himself. I will say clearly, Octavio Paz is one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language. His work is not only the most impressive, but the most influential of his time. Comparable to [ unintelligible ] prolific voice to [ unintelligible ] metaphysical poetry to [ unintelligible ] to [ foreign language ] on elegance and of course to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz about whom Paz wrote his brilliant essay, "Sor Juana [ foreign language ] ." My reading on Paz dates back to 1979, when in a course about poetry after avant-garde taught by my teacher Guillermo Sucre [ spelled phonetically ] I read his poem as a work that compiled all his work before 1975. I [ unintelligible ] of the '60s. I was embouyed with oriental practices and philosophies: yoga, naturalism, tai chi, [ unintelligible ] , and even astrology were all part of the air that I used to breath. For this reason, for me Octavio Paz was more than a discovery. He was an encounter with a different language that allowed me to articulate unspeakable experiences, experiences that I have through other routes and that I would now discover an analogical system of his poems. Nothing I have learned until then of Hispanic poetry so resembled what I have already conceived as the framework in which my own life was organized or unorganized. In Paz, I found echoes that clearly rumbled inside me from making probably my personal writing vocation in 1981 when I still lived in Caracas. El Nacional [ spelled phonetically ] published two of my essays on Paz. Now that I return to this parcel of memory, I remember the day when I met him. It was in Barcelona, in a literary conference on a day as warm and bright as his poetry. He had been accompanied by [ unintelligible ] , by [ unintelligible ] , and [ unintelligible ] introduced us and soon I felt his eagerness to convey his generosity in responding to my questions about the theme of the city in his works. An alternating current, Paz had word that in Mexican hours they [ unintelligible ] hardly exists, existed. Even though he himself has written various poems paying homage to the cities, that night amidst of the noises of unimpersonal [ spelled phonetically ] party typical of all academic encounters, I spotted him standing alone in the middle of the room. In that instance I thought, how fame and power can both strip away privacy and impose solitude. Paz approaches me to ask if [ unintelligible ] was going to come to the party. He was, of course, looking for his friend to share in the camaraderie that is lacking among strangers. The second time I saw Paz was in New York City. Although, since then, I only encounter him in the pages of his books, in photos, or in T.V and documentaries. Each time my interest has grown. I read his essays, admiring his ideas, all of which went against the grain at the moment when there was near uniformity among Latin American intellectuals. I remember the [ foreign language ] but what most fascinated me than and now were his books on criticism and theory of poetry, Science and Rotation, [ unintelligible ] , Alternating Current and The Children of Mire. Without him knowing or me realizing it, Paz armed me with the possibility to bridge the gap between personal experience and poetic writing. Such as my surprise that I only dared to take advantage of his poetry theory in order to disqualify such poets as [ unintelligible ] , and yet Paz's poetry always seems to me, ungraspable. Indeed were it not for this fruitful dialogue that has given me the grace to overcome the fear about speaking about his poetry and criticism, perhaps I would have left him untouched. And besides, there already exists an entire overwhelming library of criticism and commentaries about all his work. Paz publishes his first book at the age of 19. This demonstrates how central poetry became in his life. I sense that the center of Octavio Paz's creative thought is freedom, that his poetry, that his poetry is founded upon the desire to escape bodily forms in which the concrete world organizes and imprisons us, a desire to hurry to the end that always reaches its goal when forms have served their purpose and forces regained their freedom. It is not about freedom as a mere win of free will but rather freedom as a right to choose the right path so as not to be abandoned to chaos. A poem of his states, "Freedom is willingness to [ unintelligible ] and so we can become both bow and the arrow, the core and the lyre." Freedom impasses poetry as a condition for sincerity, because for Paz as he says, "Poetry is an operation capable of changing the world." Poetic activity is revolutionary by nature and a spiritual exercise, a missile of internal liberation. How good is that Paz consistently reminds us through his poetry that the struggle for freedom is the very first a struggle that begins and ends with a poetic war. As I allowed myself to be carried by what there was written of Paz' poetry inspires in me and assimilate it into my own personal system I strive to create another system that makes it more intelligible for us since poetry ultimately is inexplicable. Most of Octavio Paz's essays are inseparable from his poetry. This is because in his essays he addresses his theories about poetry and because both partake of the critical language that is the most radical critic of reality. Furthermore, Paz's essays about poetry are themselves a supreme exercise in freedom in the sense that they avoid all forms of dogma, an exercise that disappoints all those who hope to encounter logic in a total texts of contradictions. And so Paz' dialectical constitution puts waste between war and silence, absence and presence, abundance and emptiness, in order to save itself from a relative historical reality. The poetic arts, Paz also wrote, is the consecration of the [ unintelligible ] . A statement which implies we must open ourselves to freedom in order to live the present and accept truths that are momentary. All with emotion and for this reason always relative, for example, in "Science and Rotation," an essay originally published by itself and later included as the epilogue to The Bow and the Lyre is a poetic manifesto. It contains a theory of freedom in poetry and defines what had been poetic creation up to that point. There he asked himself, "Is it a fantasy to think in a society that reconciles poems and ads, the living world and the world lived?" And he responds skeptically about the promise rule of united community where poetry would be practical. Because poetry would not be longer, excuse me, because poetry would no longer be the nucleus of contradiction that both affirm and deny history. Paz notes that the many challenges that the future poets needs to face, and the first one will be the loss of the major world, shattered in a thousand pieces. That is the world has lost both its center and its cyclic conscience that once ruled life and society. The second challenge would be the appearance of our universal vocabulary composed of active signs determined by technology. Although technology itself [ unintelligible ] on the image of the world. On the contrary, technology denies an image of the world. Third and last, poets must ultimately face the crisis of meaning, because the laws of the individual are the future, which implies a mutilation of the past, which, in turn, suffers both life and death. Thus faced with these challenges past predicts that we will not have any other option than to live the instant as if it were unending but knowing that it can end right now. Living the otherness of our hearts, otherness not to be confused with spiritual experience, since for him there is nothing that makes us think that the spirit is any different from the body. His proposal in this essay is [ unintelligible ] . He proposes poetry as experience of otherness in order to supercede ourselves and on a social level, he signals that a new revolutionary movement will have to include two aspects that Marx has disdained, the libertarian tradition and [ unintelligible ] poetics. Paz's [ unintelligible ] essays and poems correlate to one another. Poetry motivates his criticism while, criticism illuminates his poetry. Both derive from a common source, the exercise of freedom. Yet, how does Octavio Paz define freedom in poetic terms? In one poem he states, "Freedom is wings. The wind lifts, passing over a simple flower and the sleep in which we are our dream. It is eating our forbidden fruit, the opening of a random gate, untying the prisoner that its tone is spread [ spelled phonetically ] . Those white papers are seagulls, the leaves are birds, your fingers, Here, Paz implies the notions of mobility, friction, desire, transgression and the power of the word to change the nature of things through a magical, metaphoric cooperation. In the preface to Poemeus [ spelled phonetically ] , 1979, he challenges the reader to discover whether there is something that does not change in his changes. I propose that what does not change in his work is the vocation for freedom. For Paz, surrealism was decisive because it opened the doors to personal freedom and creativity. That is, surrealism taught him to liberate imagery and a more flexible syntax, the freedom of the unconscious, an analogical system including the tarot [ spelled phonetically ] that led him to a vision of the universe as a system of correspondences and a vision of the language as the Tao [ spelled phonetically ] of the universe. Libertad Bajo Palabra [ spelled phonetically ] from 1949 is a milestone in Paz's poetry. It marks his entrance into the English tradition through T.S. Eliot, Cumens [ spelled phonetically ] and Ezra Pound and to the French tradition with surrealism, Mallarme and the symbolists. Libertad Bajo Palabra, conversational language and syntactical simplicity are both present along with the sonnets and other traditional forms of concivic [ spelled phonetically ] versifications. Haikus, the poetic form introduced to the Mexican poetry by Juan Tavolata, also appear as well as realism as a libertarian attitude towards life. The poet's central idea of poetry is freedom, and find expressions through eroticism, through otherness, as they reach to return to a lost paradise, and through his search for the world that is able to become a sad image of reality. In Evil Asan, also from 1949-1950, he tells us, "Today I fight alone with the world that which concerns me to which I'm concerned. Heads or tails. Eagle or sun." He not only alludes to the two sides of the coin but the two poles of the cross from Liberated Bajo Palabra to Arbo Arlento [ spelled phonetically ] , his last book of poems, the struggle to find the mother world of all that exists is constant. Where will the world's city light again? The proportion that governs him and speech, the dance, the city and the balances. An immense world with our reverse, a creative world that calls Brel, Brel and that appears on the table that they liberate. In a more personal aspect, Libertad Bajo Palabra is a seal of freedom, too, because here Paz break with all the poets of his generation upon introducing a more colloquial tone and a non-political poetry. Paz's poetry is exceptional as a synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions, not to mention our poetry. For it crossed cultural connections for having been a bridge between pure poetry and political poetry and for his use of erotic for his universal phenomenon that occurs not only between couples, but also in texts and, of course, in the universe. Frequently in Paz's poems, eroticism is realized through sensual language that is given erotic dimensions through elements such as light, wind, ships. "Light is autumn [ spelled phonetically ] under a storm on your hair. Wind wipes your shoulder, bites your back, and disrobes you. Burns and become eyes." Or else, "Two ships with sails unfurled, your breasts, your back is a torrent, your womb is a petrified garden." In short, body becomes a sexualized nature, Earth is a woman; a woman is nature. "Allow me one more time to name you Earth, warm woman of the sleep in rivers, my pavial [ spelled phonetically ] universe of fish [ spelled phonetically ] , in a great love I bury you." Erotic love produces a state of abandon, a time converged into eternal present, the moment when the unity of the universe reverse through identification with the couple because love is an operation -- couple [ spelled phonetically ] changing the world. Whenever two people kiss each other, desires takes place. But also present in his poems is the figure of the procreating and devoting mother, a mother through whom one enters the final freedom of forms, the same forms that are subject to this, "The dream of death that ensues in my flesh, but in your flesh, my flesh dream of its return." Accidental illogic of otherness, desire of the infinite through the poem, is yet another way in which one can exercise freedom. And yet, what is this sadly otherness? In "Science and Rotation," Paz defines it as follows, "Otherness is, before all, the simultaneous perception that we are others without changing who we are. Without changing our location, our being is in another place and we are here, and also I am alone and I am with you." In sum, the experience of otherness is here the other life. Otherness, then, is one of the central motives in all Paz's poetry, a revolving door that allows him to go inside [ spelled phonetically ] himself without leaving himself in the poem. Writing, for example, one of the poems in which he addresses the otherness he says, "When over the paper the pen goes writing in any solitary hour, who drives the pen? To whom is he writing, he who writes for me?" In this passage, Paz refers the activity to the other I that is the same poet. But perhaps the lines that expresses most emphatically his contact with otherness artists [ spelled phonetically ] , "I don't sing my song but rather he who is within me," or else "Talking to it, I talk to you." Naturally, this recalls us Antonio Machado when he's in the poems self-portrayed that Manuel Seurat once made famous has self, "I converse with the man who is always inside me who, speaking to himself, waits to speak to God one day." My solo loqui [ spelled phonetically ] , is conversation with this good friend who has taught me the secret of philanthropy. Knowing that everything recurs, that history is nonlinear and the cycles are inexorable, completely grant us the free will to act while realizing that there is accumulating [ spelled phonetically ] point that coincides, much like a point of origin in a racetrack. Cyclic conscience can be clearly seen in Paz's "In Uxmal," one of his most Mexican poems, where multiple associations are awakened in the poem since he has been there before. That he's, indeed, one of those who has returned yet nowhere buried [ spelled phonetically ] than in the "Sunstone" of the cyclic idea visible to the repetition of the first stanza that also concludes this long poem. I quote: as a crystal willow, a poplar of water, a tall fountain the wind arches over, a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still, a course of a river that turns, moves on, doubles back, and comes full circle, forever arriving Life is what happens in parentheses, the end is the beginning. Understanding cycles to which we are bound means freeing ourselves. If the entire universe is subject to cycles, Paz's words cannot escape this law. Eagle or Sun from 1951 recurs in Salamander in 1962. Libertad Bajo Palabra from 1955 takes on a different tone in Huelta [ spelled phonetically ] and in Arbo Alentro. In Huelta, from 1976, one of Paz's last books of poems, Paz reduced his last return to Mexico, a book of encounters with friends and places, such as de prepus [ spelled phonetically ] and il defense [ spelled phonetically ] . Huelta is all about returns. His return to his country after renouncing his ambassadorship in India in protest for the Tlatelolco massacre. His return to his concerns about freedom, otherness, poetry and the insufficience of language. And, of course, the return to another cycle of violence in his native Mexico as in the following lines: "We are surrounded. I have gone back to where I began. Did I win or lose? What laws rule success and failure?" All the negative criticism and controversies that this colossal poet once provoke have stayed in the past. Today we see clearly the role that this great poet and essayist has played in American literature. And even though his essays are, perhaps, better known than his poetry, he always considered himself primarily a poet, a poet who is universal, and recognized as master of new generations in Spanish and in other languages. In Paz's poetry, freedom leaps from words to silence. No less certain is that it does it upon the winds of light. Were we to do an inventory of Paz's images, we would not be surprised at the frequency of luminous terms: light, sun, clarity, fire, transparency, flame, star, flash, lucidity, splendor, brilliance. Paz's universe is aflame, and it burns because the poet says, "I live like this post flame, intense learn of brilliance. It is a constant work wanting to be light; wanting to be free, to occupy a space; wanting to be aflame, free from the fire wood; or the weak that sustains it." This is part of Octavio Paz's legacy, a universal poet who never stopped feeling and expressing himself as a Mexican, a Latin American, and like so few, professed a passionate love for truth. He avoided the deceits of historical hour and the synchronization with the currents or fashions. He went directly to the light wherever he saw it in order to write poetry about light, about translating it into freedom, truth and beauty. This is, I believe, his legacy and it will assure him his permanence and continuity. Thank you. [ applause ] Everett Larson: Thank you very much, professor. Paz's intensity burns. The end is the beginning. We've seen poetry. We've seen politics. We've wrapped it all together in these little -- two little hours, which have been like a thousand years. [ laughter ] This intensity is here. The Library of Congress has a wealth of material, here. We've got Paz reading his own poetry, but we've got lots of books which you'll have to read, and listening to all of this makes me think, "Hey, this is really a very appropriate session to be sponsored by the Mexican Culture Institute, for what is culture but this?" [ music ] [ end of transcript ] LOC - 080523his1700 18 10/31/2008