Selected Poems of Octavio Paz by Muriel Rukeyser; Octavio Paz

Review by: J. H. Matthews

Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1965), pp. 97-100
Published by: Penn State University Press
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BOOK REVIEWS

97
occur,
such as
Donne, Bruno, Ficino,
and
Vinet,
in addition to
many
minor
ones,
they
all soon drown in doubt's
churning
sea because of sheer numerical
weight.
The work treats
Italian, French,
and
English thinkers,
but the balance
definitely
tilts in favor of the
English:
one half of the book is devoted to them. In the case of
the Italians and the
French,
one wonders to what
degree
the author
goes beyond
G. Saitta's // Pensiero Italiano nell'U manesimo e nel Rinascimento and H. Busson's
Les Sources et le
dveloppement
du rationalisme dans la littrature
franaise
de la
Renaissance,
to which he refers
frequently.
This
question
arises
perhaps
because
Professor Allen
hardly synthesizes,
nor does he have a
conclusion,
a
probably danger-
ous
undertaking
from which he shies
away.
He
has, however,
warned us that he
represents only
the "tuba"
through
which he will let the voices sound off.
Just
the
same,
there is a certain
looseness,
which is
partially tightened by
an
implied
evolu-
tion
throughout
the book of
thought
and attitudes
spanning
at least two centuries.
We
may
consider as a conclusion the thesis of the
appendix,
which contains an
analysis
and a
history
of an
anonymous
work,
De Tribus
Impostoribus,
the
impostors
being
Moses, Christ,
and
Mohammed;
the moral of this work
expresses
the belief
that man should follow his own nature because
religion
is
actually
a human creation
and not a divine one.
This reader
regrets
that Professor Allen did not have a trained
eye
check the
foreign language
citation and
titles,
because he has found at least
twenty
errors,
too
burdensome to enumerate
here,
in French and Italian
alone, mostly misspellings,
wrong genders,
and omitted accents. In one
case,
a
quotation
of Voltaire
produces
a
complete
non
sequitur
because of the omission of the verb
(p. 59).
True,
such errors
do not detract from the
quality
of the
book,
but
they
are
incompatible
with the
erudition found in it.
In another era Doubt's Boundless Sea could
easily
have been
placed
on the Index.
But in our
time,
or at
any time,
some readers
may
feel an
affinity
for
many
of the
expounded theological
and
philosophical arguments.
The book substantiates brilli-
antly
the old
adage:
"Faith is to be
respected,
but doubt is essential to an education."
Marcel Tetel Du\e University
Selected Poems
of
Octavio Paz. A
bilingual
edition with translations
by
Muriel
Rukeyser. Bloomington
: Indiana
University Press,
1963. 171
pp.
On November
2, 1959
Basil
Taylor
introduced on the British
Broadcasting Corpo-
ration's Third
Programme
a series of
talks, interviews,
and
discussions, organized
by
Leonie Cohn under the
general
title "Art- Anti-Art." Not all the contributions to
the
series,
which ran
through
the winter of
1959-60,
were of
equal
interest,
and some
were even of doubtful
pertinence.
However,
the
programme necessarily
led to a
discussion of surrealism and of its
place
in the anti-art tradition of the twentieth
century.
On
January
11 Olivier Todd interviewed
Philippe Soupault,
some of whose
opin-
ions on surrealism were
reported
in N 10-11 of
Bief, Jonction
surraliste
(February
15, i960), together
with some relevant statements from a similar interview with
Eugne
Ionesco. Not
cited, though,
was the contribution of A. G.
Lehmann,
Pro-
fessor of French at the
University
of
Reading,
who
spoke
on
January
18 on "Sur-
realism, Love,
and the
Marquis
de Sade." Lehmann's views were not
reported
in
98
+
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
print
because
they
had
already
been attacked in a
discussion,
"In Defence of Sur-
realism,"
led
by Jacques
Brunius and broadcast on
February 9. Participants
were
Robert
Benayoun, Joyce Mansour,
Nora
Mitrani,
and Octavio Paz.
With the
agreement
of the Mexican National Commission for
Unesco,
these
Selected
Poems,
chosen
by
their
author,
have been
accepted
in the Unesco Collection
of Translations of
Contemporary
Works
-
Latin-American Series. The volume is a
tribute to a
poet
whose
qualities
his translator seems in no
way
inclined to discuss.
When she is not
taking refuge
behind Ramon
Xirau,
David
Palmer,
and
especially
J.
M.
Cohen,
whose assessment of Paz
appears
in his
Poetry of
this
Age (1959),
Muriel
Rukeyser employs
a
style perfectly adapted
to
concealing
the nature of her
appreciation
of the work of a man she
professes
to admire: "As translator I was
compelled
to these sources:
pain
as
speech,
trust in the ancient
-
not as
sacrifice,
but
as
trust,
to cut out one's heart in order to feed the
sun,
to face the
cycle
because
you
know it is the
only way through
and //
turns,
it is
you
who are
brought through.
As
you
are in
coming
to a work of
art, your
own or another's whose
images you
go deeper
and
deeper with; you
know that however
you emerge,
it will be with
different desires"
(p. 10). Clearly
we can look for little
help
in this book's Foreword.
Fortunately
the
poet speaks clearly enough
for himself.
"Against
silence and noise I invent the
Word,
freedom that invents itself and
invents me
every day,"
ends the
"Prologo"
from Libertad
bajo
Palabra,
with which
Octavio Paz
begins
his selection
(p. 19).
For Paz the word is
logos:
in its
pursuit
lies the "Destino del
poeta" (Condition
de
Nube):
Words?
Yes,
made of
air,
and in the air dissolved.
Let me lose
myself among words,
let me become the air on
living lips,
a breath that
goes wandering
without
barriers,
scent of a moment in the air diffused.
Even so
light
in itself is lost.
The
constantly recurring image
of death in the
poetry
of Paz
may
well bear witness
to native Mexican and
Spanish influences;
but the
significance
of death here is the
impulse
it
generates
if not to
escape
its effects then to rise above them. So in "Mas
alia del amor"
(El Girasol)
the
poet
declares:
Everything
threatens us:
time,
that in
living fragments
severs
what I have been
from what I will
become,
as the machete
splits
the
snake;
conscience, transparency pierced through,
the
sightless
look of
seeing
oneself
looking;
words, grey gloves,
mental dust on the
grass,
water, skin;
our
names,
risen
up
between
yourself
and
me,
walls of
emptiness
no
trumpet
can shout down.
But,
he
goes
on:
Beyond ourselves,
on the frontier of
being
and
becoming,
a life more alive claims us.
BOOK REVIEWS
+
99
This is the affirmation the
poet
makes: "We must be ourselves. We must
try
to
re-establish in ourselves the sense of
privacy,
of
mystery
and
imagination."*1
For
Octavio
Paz,
as his
poetry testifies,
"Man is
imagination
and intuition."*
Through
intuition and
imagination
man finds once more in the word a
power
which
language
has lost:
From dream to
vigil
From desire to act
You needed
only
a
step
and that taken without effort
Everything belonged
to
everyone
Everyone
was
everything
Only
one word existed immense without
opposite
A word like a sun
One
day exploded
into smallest
fragments
They
were the words of the
language
that we
speak
They
are the
splintered
mirrors where the world
can see itself
slaughtered.
This "Fabula" from Semillas
para
un Himno measures all that has been
lost, just
as the
poem commencing
"Une
mujer
de movimientos de
rio,"
from the same
collection,
indicates
quite clearly
the direction in which Paz sees salvation:
A woman whose movements are a river's
Transparent gesturing
that water has
A
girl
made of water
Where
may
be read the irreversible
present
A little water where the
eyes may
drink
The
lips
swallow in a
long simple
drink
the tree the cloud the
lamp
Myself
and that
girl.
Asked
by
Brunius
during
"In Defence of Surrealism" to define the surrealist atti-
tude towards
eroticism,
Paz
replied,
"It's a
very
well-known fact that
poetry
has
erotic
roots,
but surrealism assumes a different
position. Poetry
and eroticism for sur-
realism are identical. Both have the same
origin
and the same end. A
poem
is a kind
of verbal universe
-
a universe where the
opposite
elements are united
by
the means
of
metaphor;
in
love,
which is also a
metaphor,
the
opposite poles
of
life,
active and
passive,
Yin and Yan unite
-
and more: in
poetry
and in erotic
pleasure,
the
oppo-
sites
disappear
to
give place
to new
reality.
Rimbaud said that T is 'other.'
"*
To Paz
then both
poetry
and eroticism
represent
"the
way that,
without
losing
our
'I,'
we
became 'other.' In this
sense,
we can
say
that both
poetry
and eroticism are means to
destroy
the maze of mirrors that is the so-called normal life of modern man."* In
El Girasol the
poem
"Tus
ojos"
confides,
Your
eyes
are the land of
lightning
and the
tear,
silence that
speaks,
hurricanes without
wind,
sea without
waves,
beach that
morning
discovers starred with
springs,
basket of fruits of
fire,
a lie that
nourishes,
mirrors of this
world,
doors to the
beyond,
the
easy
heartbeat of the sea at
noon,
the
absolute, quivering,
cold
uplands.
ioo
+
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
When
Jacques
Brunius reminded him of the celebrated statement in which Breton
spoke
of the
point
at which
disappear
the antinomies that surrealism has set itself
the task to
dissolve,
Paz
replied,
"For
me,
eroticism and
poetry,
which are identical
as I
say,
have
perhaps
the
only way
to arrive at this
point.
In eroticism as in
poetry,
the two
opposites
that we are made of
-
death and life- one of them in this moment
disappears."*
BRUNIUS: You mean transcends . . .
PAZ: Yes.
BRUNIUS: ... the
opposition
between life and death?
PAZ: Yes. Yes. And not
only that,
but there is an ethical lesson because in
love we are
possessive
but in the same
way
we are not
possessive any
longer.
Then man as
"I,"
as
"me," disappears,
as in
poetry.*
"Take
me, you
who are woman and
solitary,"
Paz
says
in "La Poesia"
(A
la
Orilla del
Mondo),
take me
among
the
dreams,
take
me, my mother,
awaken me
wholly,
make me dream
your dream,
anoint
my eyes
with
your oil,
so that in
knowing you
I know
myself.
Octavio Paz is faithful to surrealism in
considering poetry
as a means to
enlarge
self-knowledge,
to advance
persistently
man's search for true
identity.
And it is a
measure of the
significance
of his verse that this should be so.
J.
H. Matthews
University of
Minnesota
NOTE
i. Octavio Paz has
graciously
authorized
reproduction
here of
remarks,
marked with an
asterisk,
drawn from the
transcript
of the
telcdiphone recording
of "In Defence of
Surrealism,"
made available
through
the kind
co-operation
of Miss Leonie
Cohn,
of the British
Broadcasting
Corporation's
Talks
Department.