Selected Poems by Paz Octavio
Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists who drew their own maps of the world. For Latin America's foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center of a global mandala, a cultural configuration that, in his life and work, he has traced to its furthest reaches: to Spain, as a young Marxist during the Civil War; to San Francisco and New York in the early 1940s; to Paris, as a surrealist, in the postwar years; to India and Japan in 1952, and to the East again as his country's ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968; and to various universities in the United States throughout the 1970s. A great synthesizer, the rich diversity of Paz's thought is shown here in all its astonishing complexity. Among the sixty-seven selections in this volume, a gathering in English of his most essential poems drawn from nearly fifty years' work, are Muriel Rukeyser's now classic version of Sun Stone and new translations by editor Weinberger of Blanco and Maithuna. And since for Paz, forever in motion, there can be no such thing as a definitive text, all the poems have been revised to conform to the poet's most recent changes in the original Spanish. Besides those by Rukeyser and Weinberger, the translations in the Selected Poems are by G. Aroul, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, William Carlos Williams, and Monique Fong Wust.The Nobel Prize-winning OCTAVIO PAZ was born in 1914, near Mexico City. His family was forced into exile, which they served in the United States, after the assassination of Mexican president Zapata, in 1919. In 1943 Paz received a Guggenheim Fellowship and he moved to the United States in order to study at the University of California, where he stayed for two years. In 1945 Paz became a Mexican diplomat and moved to Paris, where he would write his masterpiece The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a collection of nine essays regarding the Mexican identity. From 1970 to 1974 Paz lectured at Harvard University, where he was made an honorary doctor in 1980. In 1977, Paz was awarded the prestigious Jerusalem Prize for literature and in 1982 he was awarded the Neustadt Prize. It was in 1990 that Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity. Paz died of cancer in 1998.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780140422467 |
| ISBN 10 | 0140422463 |
| Title | Selected Poems |
| Author | Paz Octavio |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Year published | 1979-08-30 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |