The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987: Bilingual Edition
by Octavio Paz
from New Directions Publishing Corporation
tr Weinberger, w/Bishop, Blackburn, Levertov et al
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated
by Eliot Weinberger
from Moyer Bell
Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith
by Octavio Paz
from Belknap Press
Mexico's leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial literature and one of the great poets of her age.
Her life reads like a novel. A spirited and precocious girl, one of six illegitimate children, is sent to live with relatives in the capital city. She becomes known for her beauty, wit, and amazing erudition, and is taken into the court as the Vicereine's protégée. For five years she enjoys the pleasures of life at court--then abruptly, at twenty, enters a convent for life. Yet, no recluse, she transforms the convent locutory into a literary and intellectual salon; she amasses an impressive library and collects scientific instruments, reads insatiably, composes poems, and corresponds with literati in Spain. To the consternation of the prelates of the Church, she persists in circulating her poems, redolent more of the court than the cloister. Her plays are performed, volumes of her poetry are published abroad, and her genius begins to be recognized throughout the Hispanic world. Suddenly she surrenders her books, forswears all literary pursuits, and signs in blood a renunciation of secular learning. The rest is silence. She dies two years later, at forty-six.
Octavio Paz has long been intrigued by the enigmas of Sor Juana's personality and career. Why did she become a nun? How could she renounce her lifelong passion for writing and learning? Such questions can be answered only in the context of the world in which she lived. Paz gives a masterly portrayal of the life and culture of New Spain and the political and ideological forces at work in that autocratic, theocratic, male-dominated society, in which the subjugation of women was absolute.
Just as Paz illuminates Sor Juana's life by placing it in its historical setting, so he situates her work in relation to the traditions that nurtured it. With critical authority he singles out the qualities that distinguish her work and mark her uniqueness as a poet. To Paz her writings, like her life, epitomize the struggle of the individual, and in particular the individual woman, for creative fulfillment and self-expression.
El arco y la lira (Seccion de Lengua y Estudios Literarios)
by Octavio Paz
from Fondo de Cultura Economica, Mexico
A Sor Juana Anthology
by Sor Juana
from Harvard University Press
El Laberinto De La Soledad (Popular)
by Octavio Paz
from Fondo De Cultura Economica Inc
In Light of India
by Octavio Paz
from Harcourt
Anyone who knows India, or simply dreams of her, will find Octavio Paz's fascinating new book In Light of India spellbinding. Paz was Mexico's Ambassador to India from 1962 until 1968; during his six years in that ancient and multicultural country, he befriended poets, politicians, and ordinary Indians, and soaked up quite a bit of India's history and tragedy in the process. The eleven essays collected here are framed by an introduction and a farewell, and divided among three sections entitled "Religions, Castes, Languages," "A Project of Nationhood," and "The Full and the Empty." In each, Paz weaves the strands of religion, art, culture, and politics as he takes the reader on a tour of India's past and present.
Paz writes with great authority on a variety of subjects, from architecture and poetry to the history of Hindu-Muslim relations on the subcontinent. But some things are beyond the comprehension of an outsider. Though he makes a heroic attempt to explain the intricacies of the caste system, the tragedy of the untouchables remains problematic. This book conveys an India at once seductive and perilous, one that will hold your interest and inspire your wanderlust until the very last page.
Sunstone/Piedra De Sol
by Octavio Paz
from New Directions Publishing Corporation
Paz's great poem, tr Eliot Weinberger, bilingual
Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz O Las Trampas De La Fe (Obras Completas)
by Octavio Paz
from Fondo de Cultura Economica USA
Early Poems, 1935-1955 (New Directions Paperbook, Ndp354)
by Octavio Paz
from New Directions Publishing Corporation
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