Octavio Paz (1914-1998), like his Mexican compatriot, Alfonso Reyes, was not only a poet but also a diplomat and versatile man of letters, a philosopher, essayist, translator and superb editor.
This Collected Poems 1957-1987 brings together, as the editor and translator, Eliot Weinberger, tells us in his brief preface, almost every poem written by Paz during the period covered by the volume. The book first appeared in 1988 while Paz was alive and even collaborated with Weinberger. It seems odd that this reissue contains no reference to Paz's winning of the Nobel Prize nor to his death. But that preamble out of the way, one should say immediately that to have the bulk of Octavio Paz's poetry available here in English again in a single volume, and available in a handsomely produced, bilingual, paperback volume at a reasonable price, is an event to be celebrated.
It is not easy to find one's way through the poetry of Paz. It is not that he is obscure in any way: on the contrary, just as in his prose, he is a remarkably clear writer. His Spanish offers few real difficulties to his translator as does for example the syntactically tortuous work of CΘsar Vallejo, and Eliot Weinberger is to be complimented for doing a very fine job, putting himself totally at the service of his originals and resisting any temptation to be falsely tricky.
For all his celebratory interest in the atavistic and telluric, sensual and erotic, Paz is no Lawrence or Neruda, poets who were capable of creating in language a passionate physicality, a poetry of palpable texture.
By contrast, despite his avowed interest in the physical, Paz somehow always seems to mediate the physical through a process of cerebration, through ideas, so that a great deal of his poetry reads to me as literary in the pejorative sense of the word. In saying this, I am not of course implying that poetry should eschew ideas; but when a poet sets himself the task of evoking and celebrating the physical, the instinctive, as does Paz, it seems to me fair enough to expect the poetry to have a corresponding sense of the tangible.
Here is an example of what I mean. It is the short poem 'This Side':
There is light. We neither see nor touch it.
In its empty clarities rests
what we touch and see.
I see with my fingertips
what my eyes touch:
shadows, the world.
With shadows I draw worlds,
I scatter worlds with shadows.
I hear the light beat on the other side.
Paz is telling us what he intends, but he is not presenting the world, in Pound's sense of the word. And for all his interest in experimentation, it seems to me that little of this gets into the texture of the poetry, though there is a fair deal of it in the forms.
For my liking, there is too much of the philosopher in Paz's poetry, and this is most in evidence in the longer poems in which Paz has the scope to be discursive (not, mind you, that Paz is ever lacking in very interesting things to tell us). So in this collection the least successful poems seem to me to be the lengthy 'Sunstone' and the long sequences; the most successful, the short and almost stand-alone lyrics such as 'Brotherhood':
I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.
Some years back in this newspaper I wrote an appreciation of Paz on the occasion of his Nobel award. Although naturally giving due prominence to Paz's poetry, I found myself concentrating on his intellectual achievements. He was a man of enormous and varied erudition as well as being one of the finest prose stylists in Spanish of the last century. And he was a man of deeply held moral principles, a truly good man, a generous man of great friendships.
For these reasons I hate to sound carping now. But I suspect that the basis of my critical reservations is that I think Paz would have done better justice to his poetic talent by settling for smaller but ultimately more human themes (a deliberate and sage choice made by the Argentine Borges). However, there is enough good poetry in this book to make its reading a richly rewarding experience.
Michael Smith is a poet, translator and publisher. His version of Federico Garc∅a Lorca's Tamarit Poems is due out from Dedalus early next year; also due out early next year is his version of the old English epic fragment The Battle of Maldon with a cover by Louis le Brocquy
Michael Smith
Collected Poems 1957-1987. By Octavio Paz. Translated by Eliot Weinberger. Carcanet, 669 pp. £14.95 in UK