MEXICO'S PAZ WINS LITERATURE NOBEL
Author: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff
Date: Friday, October 12, 1990
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and man of letters in the grand tradition,
as well as an at times controversial patriarch of Latin American culture, has
won this year's Nobel Prize for literature. The announcement was made
yesterday in Stockholm.
The Swedish Academy, in selecting Paz, cited the 76-year-old author "for
impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence
and humanistic integrity."
As is not always the case with the literary Nobel, Paz's selection met with
widespread approval.
The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa said in Washington, "Octavio is
one of the greatest poets that the Spanish-language world has produced and, at
the same time, a great humanist."
Gregory Rabassa, a leading US translator of Latin American literature said
in a phone interview: "I certainly think he deserves it. He's the best poet
writing in Spanish today. . . He represents a certain generation, that is, the
last of the third generation of Modernists."
While primarily a poet, Paz won the most fame for his meditation on Mexican
culture "The Labyrinth of Solitude," published in 1959. His greatest poem is
generally considered to be "Sun Stone," published in 1957, which was inspired
by a monumental stone Aztec calendar. Critics have praised the poetry as
lyrical and erotic and said it expresses Paz's sense of the deep loneliness of
man, which can be transcended only through attempts at communion, sexual love,
compassion and faith.
At once intensely local yet marked by a singular worldliness of vision,
Paz's writing springs from the often-harsh landscape of Mexico, the source of
much of his imagery. Paz is also a literary cosmopolite, whose varied
background as editor, diplomat and author have informed his wide-ranging
literary and political pronouncements. Literary influences range from the
17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana -- his most recent book to be translated
into English is a study of her work -- to T. S. Eliot and the Surrealists of
the 1930s.
Born in Mexico City in 1914, Paz has attributed his early interest in
literature to his grandfather's extensive library. At 17, he founded an avant-
garde literary journal and at 19 he published his first book of poetry,
''Forest Moon." A fervent supporter of the Republican cause, he spent a year
in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
A few years later, Paz joined the Mexican foreign service, in which he
would serve for a quarter century. One of his first assignments was as a
secretary at the Mexican Embassy in Paris in 1945. He later served as Mexican
charge d'affaires in Japan before becoming ambassador to India in 1962. He
resigned that post in protest when the Mexican army crushed an antigovernment
movement and killed more than 300 students in 1968.
Paz has always considered himself a socialist, but also has criticized the
left and for this he has been ostracized. His criticism of the former
Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and of Fidel Castro's Cuba has especially drawn
the ire of leftist intellectuals. "The national interests of Mexico are not
those of Washington," Paz has written, "but they aren't Havana's either." In a
sense, Paz has always been most comfortable as a political party of one.
Paz still publishes a Mexican journal Vuelta, or Return, which he founded
in 1976. He received the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world,
the Cervantes prize, in 1981.
Paz learned of his Nobel selection in New York City, where he is
inaugurating a Mexican art exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "I was
very, very surprised," he said, adding that he planned to have "a delightful
day."
He welcomed the prize as "a sign that the Spanish and Latin American
literature is in good health." Last year's winner, Spain's Camilo Jose Cela,
echoed that view, calling Paz's selection "a great triumph for the glorious
Spanish language."
Paz is the fifth Nobel laureate from Latin America; the last before him was
Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia, in 1982.
Swedish Radio culture expert Jan-Olov Ullen said Paz had been on the
Swedish Academy's "short list" of top candidates for many years.
Others said to be in the running included the Chinese poet Bei Dao, the
Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the American novelist Joyce Carol Oates, the
Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado, novelist Margaret Atwood of Canada, the South
African author Nadine Gordimer and the Japanese novelist Masuji Ibuse.
The prize, worth $700,000, is one of five awarded in October under terms
of the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in
1896.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded Monday in Oslo. The Nobel Prizes in
chemistry and physics will be awarded on Oct. 17 in Stockholm.
The Central Bank of Sweden endowed the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in
1969. It will be awarded on Oct. 16.
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