191442960 Selected Poems of Octavio Paz 1965

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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 definitelytilts in favor of the English: one half of the book is devoted to them. In the case ofthe Italians and the French, one wonders to what degree the author goes beyondG. Saitta's // Pensiero Italiano nell'U manesimo e nel Rinascimento and H. Busson'sLes Sources et le développement du rationalisme dans la littérature française de laRenaissance, to which he refers frequently. This question arises perhaps becauseProfessor 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 thesame, there is a certain looseness, which is partially tightened by an implied evolu-tion

throughoutthe book of

thoughtand attitudes

spanningat 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 impostorsbeing Moses, Christ, and Mohammed; the moral of this work expresses the beliefthat man should follow his own nature because religion is actually a human creationand 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, tooburdensome 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 theerudition 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 MurielRukeyser. 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, organizedby 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 somewere 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 surréaliste (February15, i960), together with some relevant statements from a similar interview with

Eugène 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, theseSelected Poems, chosen by their author, have been accepted in the Unesco Collectionof Translations of Contemporary Works - Latin-American Series. The volume is atribute 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 especiallyJ. 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 youknow 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 yougo deeper and deeper with; you know that however you emerge, it will be withdifferent 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 andinvents me every day, ends the Prologo from Libertad bajo Palabra, with whichOctavio Paz begins his selection (p. 19). For Paz the word is logos: in its pursuitlies 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 hat 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 witnessto native Mexican and Spanish influences; but the significance of death here is theimpulse it generates if not to escape its effects then to rise above them. So in Masalia del amor (El Girasol) the poet declares:

Everything hreatens us:time, that in living fragments severswhat I have beenfrom what I will become,as the machete splits the snake;conscience, ransparency ierced through,the sightless ook 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.



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This is the affirmation the poet makes: We must be ourselves. We must try tore-establish in ourselves the sense of privacy, of mystery and imagination. *1 For

Octavio Paz, as his poetry testifies, Man is imagination and intuition. * Throughintuition and imagination man finds once more in the word a power which languagehas lost:

From dream to vigilFrom desire to act

You needed only a step and that taken without effort

Everything belonged to everyoneEveryone was everything

Only one word existed immense without oppositeA word like a sun

One day exploded nto smallest ragmentsThey were the words of the language that we speakThey are the splintered mirrors where the world

can see itself slaughtered.

This Fabula from Semillas para un Himno measures all that has been lost, justas 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'sTransparent esturing that water hasA girl made of water

Where may be read the irreversible resentA little water where the eyes may drinkThe lips swallow in a long simple drinkthe tree the cloud the lampMyself 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 haserotic 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 kindof verbal universe a universe where the opposite elements are united by the meansof

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 Pazthen both poetry and eroticism represent the way that, without losing our 'I,' webecame '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. * InEl 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 tarred 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.



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When Jacques Brunius reminded him of the celebrated statement in which Bretonspoke 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 identicalas 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 n

love we are possessive but in the same way we are not possessive anylonger. Then man as I, as me, disappears, s in poetry.*

Take me, you who are woman and solitary, Paz says in La Poesia (A laOrilla 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 enlargeself-knowledge, to advance persistently man's search for true identity. And it is ameasure of the

significanceof his verse that this should be so.

J. H. Matthews University of Minnesota

NOTEi. 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 BroadcastingCorporation's Talks Department.

Documents

191442960 Selected Poems of Octavio Paz 1965