the poems of
OCTAVIO PAZ
Also by Octavio Paz
Available from New Directions
The Collected Poems 1957–1987
Configurations
A Draft of Shadows
Eagle or Sun?
Early Poems 1935–1955
Figures & Figurations
Selected Poems
Sunstone
A Tale of Two Gardens
A Tree Within
CONTENTS
Table of Contents
A Note on the Selection
A Note on the Ebook Edition
First Poems [1931–1940] Game
Juego
Nocturne
Nocturno
Autumn
Otoño
Your Name
Tu nombre
Monologue
Monólogo
The Root of Man
Raíz del hombre
from Beneath Your Bright Shadow
de Bajo tu clara sombra
from Ode to Spain
de Oda a España
Elegy for a Friend Dead at the Front in Aragón
Elegía a un compañero muerto en el frente de Aragón
Garden
Jardín
Poems [1941–1948] The Bird
El pájaro
Two Bodies
Dos cuerpos
Life Glimpsed
Vida entrevista
Epitaph for a Poet
Epitafio para un poeta
Sea in the Afternoon
Mar por la tarde
While I Write [MR]
Mientras escribo
The Street
La calle
Lightning at Rest [MR]
Relámpago en reposo
Interrupted Elegy
Elegía interrumpida
Nocturnal Water
Agua nocturna
Beyond Love [MR]
Más allá del amor
Virgin
Virgen
The Prisoner (D.A.F. de Sade)
El prisionero (D.A.F. de Sade)
from ¿Águila o sol? / Eagle or Sun? [1949–1950] from The Poet’s Work
de Trabajos del poeta
A Walk at Night
Paseo nocturno
Plain
Llano
Obsidian Butterfly
Mariposa de obsidiana
The Fig Tree
La higuera
Huastec Lady
Dama huasteca
Toward the Poem
Hacia el poema
Poems [1948–1957] from Semillas para un himno / Seeds for a Hymn [1950–1954]
“The day opens its hand”
“El día abre la mano”
Fable
Fábula
“A woman who moves like a river”
“Una mujer de movimientos de río”
“A day is lost”
“Un día se pierde”
Native Stone [MR]
Piedra nativa
“Though the snow falls . . .”
“Aunque la nieve caiga . . .”
Proverbs [MR]
Refranes
Piedras sueltas / Loose Stones [1955]
Object Lesson
Lección de cosas
In Uxmal
En Uxmal
Loose Stones
Piedras sueltas
from La estación violenta / The Violent Season [1948–1957]
Hymn Among the Ruins
Himno entre ruinas
Masks of Dawn [MR]
Máscaras del alba
Mutra
Mutra
Is There No Way Out? [DL]
¿No hay salida?
The River [PB]
El río
The Broken Waterjar
El cántaro roto
Piedra de sol / Sunstone [1957] Sunstone
Piedra de sol
from Salamandra / Salamander [1958–1961] Dawn [CT]
Madrugada
Here
Aquí
Shot
Disparo
Pedestrian
Peatón
Pause
Pausa
Certainty [CT]
Certeza
Landscape
Paisaje
Identity
Identidad
Walking Through the Light
Andando por la luz
Identical Time
El mismo tiempo
Cosante [DL]
Cosante
Motion
Movimiento
Duration [DL]
Duración
To Touch
Palpar
Counterparts
Complementarios
Rotation
Rotación
The Bridge
El puente
Interior
Interior
Across
A través
Odd or Even
Pares y nones
Last Dawn
Alba última
Salamander [DL]
Salamandra
from Ladera este / East Slope [1962–1968] The Balcony
El Balcón
Humayun’s Tomb
El mausoleo de Humayún
In the Lodi Gardens
En los jardines de los Lodi
The Day in Udaipur
El día en Udaipur
The Other
El otro
Epitaph for an Old Woman
Epitafio de una vieja
Happiness in Herat
Felicidad en Herat
The Effects of Baptism
Efectos del bautismo
Proof
Prueba
Village
Pueblo
Himachal Pradesh (1)
Himachal Pradesh (1)
Daybreak
Madrugada al raso
Interruptions from the West (3)
Intermitencias del oeste (3)
Nightfall
Un anochecer
Exclamation
La exclamación
Reading John Cage
Lectura de John Cage
Concert in the Garden
Concierto en el jardín
Distant Neighbor
Prójimo lejano
Writing
Escritura
Concord
Concorde
Wind from All Compass Points [PB]
Viento entero
Madrigal
Madrigal
With Eyes Closed
Con los ojos cerrados
Passage
Pasaje
Maithuna
Maithuna
Axis
Eje
Monstrance
Custodia
Sunday on the Island of Elephanta
Domingo en la isla de Elefanta
A Tale of Two Gardens
Cuento de dos jardines
Blanco [1966]
from Vuelta / Return [1969–1975] The Daily Fire
El fuego de cada día
The Grove [EB]
La arboleda
Immemorial Landscape
Paisaje inmemorial
Trowbridge Street
Trowbridge Street
Objects and Apparitions [EB]
Objetos y apariciones
Return
Vuelta
In the Middle of This Phrase . . .
A la mitad de esta frase . . .
The Petrifying Petrified
Petrificada petrificante
San Ildefonso Nocturne
Nocturno de San Ildefonso
Pasado en claro / A Draft of Shadows [1974] A Draft of Shadows
Pasado en claro
from Árbol adentro / A Tree Within [1976–1988] To Speak: To Act
Decir: hacer
Bashō-An
Bashō-An
from On the Wing (1)
de Al vuelo (1)
Wind, Water, Stone
Viento, agua, piedra
Between Going and Staying
Entre irse y quedarse
This Side
Este lado
Brotherhood
Hermandad
I Speak of the City
Hablo de la ciudad
To Talk
Conversar
A Waking
Un despertar
The Face and the Wind
La cara y el viento
A Fable of Joan Miró
Fábula de Joan Miró
Sight and Touch
La vista, el tacto
A Wind Called Bob Rauschenberg
Un viento llamado Bob Rauschenberg
The Four Poplars
Cuatro chopos
A Tree Within
Árbol adentro
Before the Beginning
Antes del comienzo
Pillars
Pilares
As One Listens to the Rain
Como quien oye llover
Letter of Testimony
Carta de creencia
Poems [1989–1996] Stanzas for an Imaginary Garden
Estrofas para un jardín imaginario
The Green News
Verde noticia
Breathing
Respiro
Soliloquy
Soliloquio
Snapshots
Instantáneas
The Same
Lo mismo
Target Practice
Ejercicio de tiro
Response and Reconciliation
Respuesta y reconciliación
Biographical Note
Notes to the Poems
Copyright
Landmarks
Cover
A Note on the Selection
Octavio Paz devoted much of his last years to organizing and revising his complete works, in collaboration with the Spanish editor Nicanor Vélez. The result was fifteen oversize volumes of 400–700 pages each, many of them with lengthy new prefaces by Paz himself. The two volumes of Obra poetica fill some 1500 pages. Along with the poems and prose poems, it includes collaborative works (most notably the quadrilingual Renga and the bilingual Hijos del aire / Airborn, written with Charles Tomlinson); a verse play based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rapaccini’s Daughter; the uncategorizable “unraveling novel” The Monkey Grammarian; and 400 pages of translations: volumes of William Carlos Williams, Pessoa, and Bashō; selections of classical Chinese, Japanese, and Sanskrit poetry; and many miscellaneous poems from European languages.
The present selection is the first in English to survey Paz’s entire career, from his first published poem at age seventeen to his last—remarkably, one of his finest—in 1996, at age eighty-two. It is limited to original poems and prose poems written by Paz alone. English-language readers curious about some of the work not included here will find more in various books published by New Directions: Early Poems, edited by Muriel Rukeyser; the complete Eagle or Sun?; Collected Poems: 1957–1987; and A Tale of Two Gardens, poems from India, which includes some of the Sanskrit versions. Renga and The Monkey Grammarian (translated by Helen Lane) have been published elsewhere. Also omitted here are the late poems of Figures & Figurations, which accompany collages by Marie-José Paz: the poems are inextricable from the artworks and a beautiful edition has been published, once again, by New Directions.
Paz more or less divided his work into two periods, the first culminating with the publication of his long poem “Sunstone” in 1957. The early work was organized and reorganized in various editions under the general title Libertad bajo palabra (which translates badly as Freedom on Parole—“parole” in English not immediately associated with “word” or, more exactly, “one’s own word”). The poems were frequently revised and were arranged more thematically than chronologically; many poems from the earlier books were omitted in later editions.
For the present selection, I have organized the early poems in a rough chronological order to show Paz’s development. (In the absence of textual scholarship and bibliographic information about periodical appearances, it is currently impossible to date the poems precisely.) A few of the omitted poems are included, but all follow what we might call Paz’s “final final” revisions for the Complete Works edition. After “Sunstone”—even that, perhaps his best-known poem, now has some new lines in it—the selections follow Paz’s book publications until the final set of his last poems, which were never published separately as a book.
Paz extensively annotated some of his poems, particularly those written in India. Factual identifications have become less necessary in the age of internet searches, and for the “Notes” section, I have given much of the space over to Paz’s own comments on his poems, taken from the innumerable interviews he gave and various essays.
Paz was extremely fortunate to have some of the best Anglo-American poets as his English translators. Beginning with Muriel Rukeyser, who was the first, energetic promoter of his work, these included Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Elizabeth Bishop, and Charles Tomlinson. Their translations are marked with their initials on the contents page and at the end of the translated poem. These translators were, of course, working from the then-current Spanish version. In some cases, the original has been revised too much for the earlier translation to be included here. In a few cases, i
n order to retain the original translation, I have added a few lines or changed a few words to conform to Paz’s revisions. These are signaled in the notes. Earlier or alternate translations of some of the poems by these and other translators (including William Carlos Williams and others) may be found in the New Directions editions of Early Poems, Configurations, A Draft of Shadows, and Selected Poems. I’ve also taken this opportunity to revise my own translations, most of them more than twenty-five years old. Poems may be finished, but a translation never is.
The first translations of Paz’s poems in any language appeared in a New Directions annual in 1947, when he was thirty-three. Although already well-known in Mexico, it was, he often said, the first sign that anyone “out there” was interested. Paz was close to the late James Laughlin and paid tribute to him, an avid skier, with an unforseeable essay on the relationship between poetry and skiing. My own active collaboration with Paz began in the late 1960s. From 1974 on, we were extraordinarily lucky to have Peter Glassgold, now retired, as our editor for some thirty years. New Directions’ sixty-five-year commitment to Paz’s work continues with this book, thanks to Barbara Epler and Jeffrey Yang.
During the making of this book, the poet and editor Nicanor Vélez died at age fifty-two. He was responsible not only for the massive Complete Works of Paz, but also for equally definitive editions of García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Rubén Darío, among others (and some fifty books of international poetry). Such meticulous editions are extremely rare in the Spanish-speaking world: Nicanor had no equal.
Thanks to Galaxia Gutenberg / Círculo de Lectores for providing the Spanish texts that Paz and Vélez prepared; to Vicente Rojo, Paz’s old friend and collaborator, for providing the Tantric Sunstone-volcano on the cover; and to Marcelo Uribe for facilitating our use of the artwork. Thanks, above all, to Marie-José Paz.
Eliot Weinberger
A Note on the Ebook Edition
This electronic edition differs in a number of ways from the print book. Most importantly, the order of the poems has been altered. As tablets and phones do not have enough screen space to accommodate facing pages, the Spanish originals have been placed at the end of each section. To navigate quickly between languages, tap or click on the title of the poem. In some Kindle devices, this will trigger a pop-up footnote: if this happens, tap “go to footnote.” If you would like to skip ahead to the next section, tap on the linked asterisks that follow the last English-language poem (* * * *). Finally, the alphabetical index has been omitted; the text-search function available on most reading systems performs the same task.