Octavio Paz

1. Octavio Paz By: Chris Muldoon and Matt DiFlorio

2. Childhood • Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City in on March 31st, 1914. • His father was active in politics, an aide to Emiliano Zapata, a populist land reformer who led a revolution against the government; a few years of Paz’s childhood were spent in Los Angeles, to which his father was forced to run off after Zapata was killed in 1919. • When the family returned to Mexico City, Paz was in his teen years and began publishing poetry and short stories. He enrolled in law school.

3. Adulthood • Paz was an expert translator fluent in several languages, and he also founded and edited literary periodicals designed to introduce Latin American readers to international writers and their works. • While Paz was still young, his father was hit and killed by a train. Later he wrote of his father's death in the poem, “Pasado en claro,” translated in English as “A Draft of Shadows.” • Paz later visited France, spent two years in the United States, and in 1945, began a twenty-three-year career in the Mexican diplomatic corps. • In 1962, he became the ambassador to India, later he resigned this post in 1968 in protest of the massacre of student protesters in Mexico City by government forces. • By 1972, he was editing the literary journal Plural. Four years later he founded Vuelta, which has become one of the foremost Latin American literary journals. • Paz died on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City.

4. Major Works • Paz mostly wrote about politics, religion, anthropology, archaeology, and poetics. • His most famous poems were Pasado en claro (A Draft of Shadows) in 1975, Arbol adentro (A Tree Within) in 1987, and A Tale of Two Gardens in 1997.

5. Accomplishments • In addition to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, Paz won numerous awards throughout his career, including the International Poetry Prize in Brussels in 1963, the Jerusalem Literature Prize and The National Prize in Letters in Mexico, in 1977. • In the following decade, he was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in Madrid in1981, the Neustadt Literature Prize of the University of Oklahoma in 1982, the German booksellers' Peace Prize in 1984, and the Oslo Poetry Prize in 1985.

6. The Street • Here is a long and silent street.I walk in blackness and I stumble and falland rise, and I walk blind, my feettrampling the silent stones and the dry leaves.Someone behind me also tramples, stones, leaves:if I slow down, he slows;if I run, he runs I turn : nobody.Everything dark and doorless,only my steps aware of me,I turning and turning among these cornerswhich lead forever to the streetwhere nobody waits for, nobody follows me, where I pursue a man who stumblesand rises and says when he sees me : nobody.