Wide Horizons

By R.Z. Sheppard

It is turning out to be a good year for the Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz. Last spring, to celebrate his 76th birthday, Mexico City's Cultural Center of Contemporary Art staged an exhibition ranging from pre-Columbian artifacts to modern paintings and called the show "Octavio Paz: The Privileges of Sight." Last week the Swedish Academy selected him for a privilege he had reason to believe was out of sight.

For years Paz has been a logical candidate with a place on the academy's short list. He has an international reputation as an intellectual and a distinguished body of lyric poetry well suited to the resounding citation that accompanied the announcement: ". . . impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity . . ."

But once again, Nobel touts were caught looking at the wrong continents. Less than an hour before Paz became the winner of the $700,000 prize, rumors were still spreading that the odds-on favorite was Chinese poet Bei Dao. If not he, then possibly Canada's Margaret Atwood, Ireland's Seamus Heaney or the U.S.'s perennial long shot, Joyce Carol Oates.

"I was very, very surprised," said Paz from New York City, where he was visiting a major mounting of Mexican art at the Metropolitan Museum. Less so was another Latin American writer often mentioned as a future Nobel laureate. A gracious Mario Vargas Llosa described Paz as "one of the greatest poets that the Spanish-language world has produced and, at the same time, a great humanist."

In an era when it is fashionable to bash Western culture and exaggerate the traditions of the southern and eastern hemispheres, Paz's work is a reminder that no part of the contemporary world is free of profound influences from another. His best-known poem, Sun Stone (1957), casts ancient Aztec symbolism in a modern mold. As a critic, he broke ground with The Labyrinth of Solitude, a study of Mexico as a New World nation improvising its future from indigenous traditions as well as revolutionary ideals from Europe and North America.

Like many Latin American writers, Paz has political credentials. He served for a time as Mexico's ambassador to India but resigned in 1968 to protest the authorities' killing of students during an antigovernment demonstration. In the 1930s Paz was a Marxist. Today communist holdouts regard him as a conservative largely because he has become a critic of "simplistic and simplifying ideologies of the left." His equally sharp disapproval of the rigid right has put him at the lonely center, where his poetry has taken on its deeply personal and moral tone.