Noticias
Jointly published by the Department of Culture and the Economic Culture Fund
Octavio Paz´s days in the UK are documented with various essays
July 28, 2016Octavio Paz breathed a new air full of old times upon his arrival in the UK in 1970, tells Michael Wood. A wind that surrounded days that formed an almost unknown season of the Mexican author’s biography whose veil is lifted along memories and exegesis; the literary tours presented in the essays and texts that make up the volume, Octavio Paz and the United Kingdom, is jointly published by the Economic Culture Fund and the Department of Culture.
Before the fatal outcome of the Student Movement of 1968, Octavio Paz had experienced a disenchantment with the Mexican government he represented as Ambassador in India. However, the events of October 2nd, of which he knew until the next day at night, sealed his resignation. For Octavio Paz that was the proof of dissipation of the revolutionary heritage.
Alejandro González Ormerod points out in his essay The Romantic Revolution of Octavio Paz, that his prestige turned against the state after his resignation. Then, it came what Carlos Fuentes told him: a blackout ordered against the poet in his country that only increased the sale of his books.
Octavio Paz found himself independent and in a limbo. In that scenario, the director of the Faculty of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge wrote to the master of Churchill College: "Paz is a figure of exceptional general culture, perhaps the most important in Latin America. It is time he has a closer contact with this country. Personally, I think he would be an admirable candidate for the Simon Bolivar Chair".
At the same time, France also offered him a chair at the Sorbonne in Vincennes knowing his intellectual and emotional bond with that country. It is somewhat strange that he had decided the United Kingdom, with which he had little closeness. A quote could illustrate this latter definition: "The great tradition of German Romanticism into English is my tradition."
Beyond the anecdote, the resonance printed in his character, in his work, and in the resolution of the path that followed his life was built thanks to his seclusion, in that atmosphere inciting reflection, to the intimacy with himself. "To choose the way, to invent it while I walk (...) I did not ask myself questions: I walked. The way disappears while I think, while I say”, Diego Gómez Pickering, current Ambassador of Mexico in UK, cites in his introductory text.
The romantic Octavio Paz experienced the two hemispheres of that movement: the revolutionary desire and its opposite led the work written at the Winston Churchill, The Monkey Grammarian. It is in this one where passions and nostalgia of British thought met, the criticism of modernity that were already part of the new mentality of the poet. The Hindu mysticism and British serenity were synthesized in a "free imagination but critical and analytical. Free, but keeping the feet on the ground. Values are both British and romantic ".
Richard Berengarten was 26 when he met Octavio Paz in Cambridge. His writing which is a personal reminiscence, covering the friendship, the personal traits and the wealth of knowledge, departed with the memory of their first meeting, when he discovered that the history of poetry was not for the poet a series of developments that could be measured with a word like progress. He used to talk animatedly, incisively and passionately. Knowing him was to find "a teacher with a vision of and for humanity”.
What Octavio Paz found in Cambridge, he recalls, was the privacy to focus on his writing, which he found it was balanced between introversion and extroversion reproducing the first one on poetry and the second one on his prose. Octavio Paz, intimate and sheltered, was not isolated, soon he and Marie Jose became part of a group of friends including Berengarten "the nights were bright and pleasant in an atmosphere of fun and vitality, refreshing compared to the serious and relatively taciturn atmosphere of the typical social exchanges of Cambridge”.
Mexico,Distrito Federal
