“Minha Terra”: Ivo’s Brazil

Snakes’ Nest or A Tale Badly Told

But sometimes, it was as if the sea did not exist, and he lived among stones, in a nest of snakes.

“During a dictatorship, all narratives are poorly told…” writes Lêdo Ivo in reference to the rambling, unreliable narration of this short novel. Indeed, as University of New Mexico professor Jon Tolman explains in his helpful introduction, Snakes’ Nest is a set in Brazil in the 1940’s, during what was known as the “New State,” a semi-fascist experiment in caudillismo, a cult of personality around the charismatic leader, Getúlio Vargas, that lasted from 1930-1945.  At heart an allegory of good and evil, this “sunny nightmare” rises like a miasma from the streets of Maceió—from the bars and brothels and sugar depots that distinguish this seedy port city in  northeastern Brazil that even today is renowned for its rampant corruption and violence.  As described in a 2011 article in The Economist, “The road from Maceió, the capital of Alagoas state, to its airport passes luxury-car showrooms and shops selling outsize Jacuzzis. In the central reservation, indigent families live under plastic sheeting. Even by the standards of Brazil's north-east, Alagoas is scarred by poverty and extreme inequality. With 107 murders per 100,000 people, Maceió is also the most violent state capital in Brazil, just as, with 60 murders per 100,000, Alagoas is the country's most violent state. It is a place of sugar and cattle, where the sugarcane cutters settle scores with fists and knives and the well-connected escape punishment by using contract killers instead.”  

It is this latter world that serves as the setting for this collection of powerfully rendered vignettes about the workaday men and women of Maceió—the lawyers, gangsters, sailors, poets, prostitutes, and nuns—a story, a novel (though Ivo denied it the name) in which the narration flits like a hummingbird from character to character, from place to place, sipping here, drinking there, darting back and forth in time as if drunk on the nectar it finds. In an age when more and more American writers are forced by the market to answer to the same dull master, that is, plot over character, murder and mystery over language and symbol and theme, this novel comes as a positive relief. 

Ivo’s heterodox approach to storytelling, to fiction, should come as no surprise to anyone who knows of him, for he was a poet, first and foremost, a writer who flirted with Modernism before turning his back on it to embrace more classical, more traditional forms. One feels the poetry in his language and rhythms, in the weight and balance of his words, yet there is nothing fussy or self-conscious about his style. Even in English his phrasing has the blunt simplicity, the force and gravitas, of prophesy or scripture, as in this passage describing the moments—the minutes, the seconds—before one of his characters, a manager of a local airline agency, blows out his brains:

"It was raining—it was a rain of words.  The wind blew—it was a wind of words.  The world wasn’t made of skies, clouds, cities, sugarcane mills, ports, dams, yards, old cars, streets, power plants, houses, men.  It was made only and exclusively of words—and the people spoke in words. Even the paving stones of Maceió were made of words.  Alexandre Viana ate words, slept words, worked words.  And he felt more alone than ever, as if the very weapon that sketched itself before his eyes would turn into a word."

While Snakes’ Nest is set in the Maceió of Ivo’s childhood, what he calls “minha terra” or “my land,” it is important to note that the period in which the novel was written, that is, the early 1970’s, was actually a more politically repressive time for Brazilian artists and writers than that of the quasi-fascist caudillismo of Getúlio Vargas, evidence enough that such authoritarianism is perfectly at home in the rich Brazilian soil. 

What makes this significant, what makes it  especially poignant to me, is that I have only just now finished reading the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s book, Brazil: A Land of the Future, a gushing, 250 page hymn to the nation that had given him home and sanctuary as a Jew in flight from Hitler’s Europe. The picture he paints of early 1940’s Brazil and its future in the world is just short of utopian, an incredible feat, given Vargas’ staunchly corporatist, right-wing, anti-Marxist politics, a tyranny over thought and expression that included censorship and the harassment, torture, and execution of leftists.  Somehow, for all of Zweig’s perspicacity as a writer and exile, he had failed to see the forest for the trees. Blinded to the rise of fascism there, in Brazil (the selfsame period described by Ivo’s novel) by his desperate need to keep faith with the human race, to believe in the possibility of a paradise on earth, Zweig ends his introduction to this Panglossian tribute by writing: “For that reason, one of our best hopes for a future civilizing and pacification of a world that has been desolated by hate and madness is based upon the existence of Brazil.”  That Brazil was indeed a sort of paradise to Zweig is clear; what is also clear—a fact perhaps only acknowledged by Zweig himself on the eve of his suicide in 1942—is that, by the time he’d finished writing Brazil: A Land of the Future, the Serpent was already in. 

Here, to conclude, is one of Ivo’s better known poems:

The Sound of the Sea

Sunday afternoon, I return to the old Maceió cemetery
where my dead never stop dying
their consumptive and cancerous deaths
that penetrate the ebb tide stench and constellations
with coughs, groans, imprecations
and their dark mucus
and in silence I summon them to return to this life
where from childhood on they slowly lived
with the bitterness of long days fixed to their monotonous existence
and the fear of dying of those who witness the close of day
when, after rain, the ants are scattered
across the maternal ground of Alagoas and can no longer fly.
I say to my dead: Arise, come back to this unfinished day
that has need of you, of your persistent cough and your tired gestures
and your footsteps on Maceió’s crooked lanes. Return to those insipid dreams
and windows opening on to suffocating heat.

On Sunday afternoon, among mausoleums
that seem suspended by the wind
in the bluish air,
the silence of the dead tells me they won’t come back.
No use calling them. From the place where they are now, there’s no return.
Just names carved in stone. Just names. And the sound of the sea.

© Translation: 2010, Alexis Levitin

Lêdo Ivo (1924-2012) was a Brazilian journalist, poet, novelist, and essayist who was awarded the prestigious Brazilian Walpmap Prize in 1973.  Born in Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil, the son of Floriano and Euridice Placido de Araujo Ivo, he later married Maria Leda Sarmento de Medeiros and fathered three children.  Ivo’s first volume of poems — As Imaginações — granted him national recognition in 1944. His other works of include Ode and Elegy, Ode to Twilight, Birth of the Sonnet, Language, and The Common Soldier.  In addition to Snakes’ Nest, he write three other novels: Alliances, The Road without Adventure, and The Death of Brazil.  Snakes’ Nest is published by New Directions Books. 

Peter Adam Nash

Poland, 1945

Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ashes and Diamonds (1948)

As a historian, there are particular moments in European history that I especially want to understand; among them, preeminent even, is the passage of Eastern Europe from Nazi Occupation to Soviet-dominated governments.  What events precipitated the defeat of nationalist aspirations in Poland (for example) during the critical years between the end of the war and the establishment of the Polish United Workers' Party under Boleslaw Bierut? The facts aren't difficult to come by; what is wanted is the feeling of these years, impressions of the primary participants in the nation's reluctant embrace of Stalinism, a sense of the human cost to a nation already dismantled by the Nazi Occupation, Hans Franks' systematic terror, and the extermination of Polish Jews.  As usual, one must turn to works of literary art to gain insights, however limited, into the tragedy of post-war Poland. 

Often the 'whys' of history are neglected in the standard textbooks. We might say, for example, that given the horrors of Nazism, the Soviet Union was a natural ally for Polish nationalists who survived the camps (non-Jewish Poles were sent to Arbeitslager or German slave labor camps like Gross-Rosen, which figures prominently in Ashes and Diamonds) and were liberated by the Red Army.  But one suspects that this explanation is too simple; the truth, it would appear from Andrzejewski's brilliant and compelling novel, is that men and women were drawn into the sphere of Soviet influence, seduced by promises of brotherhood and Polish solidarity, for all sorts of reasons--out of patriotism, despair, personal ambition, greed, and idealism.  Andrzejewski's remarkably well-drawn characters embrace or reject communism only in part because of their experiences in the war; a great strength of this novel is that it depicts the power of an individual's will even at the most "world historical" of moments.



Barracks at Gross-Rosen



At the beginning of Ashes and Diamonds, the war has just ended--or has it? One of Andrzejewski's narrative talents is the blurring of time.  The novel transpires over some undefined period of days or weeks, and the events of the war, once so visceral to its survivors, are now receding from the memories of some characters (by choice) and defining the actions of others, especially those who hope to create a communist nation--a brotherhood of equals--in Poland. In other words, history isn't experienced in the same way by every person, and this is not only true, but a brilliant novelistic observation that enriches and deepens Andrzejewski's great book.

The deftness with which Andrzejewski sketches his characters is remarkable.  During a briefing that will lead to the murder of a member of the Communist Party by a Polish nationalist, the Colonel, who has ordered the assassination, calms a young man's qualms by saying:

"We're living and fighting under very difficult and complex circumstances. But the war years, which were the testing years for everyone, have taught us that things have to be regarded in their elementary, basic set up. There's no time for subtle discrimination. If there had to be any discrimination, it must be simple and clear. Good is good, and evil evil. You agree?"

But of course nothing is ever so clear.  For the socialist Podgorski, the world isn't divided into Manichean absolutes but gray with ethical questions and humane concerns; for the ambitious Mayor Swiecki the tragedy of Poland has served only to feed his ego--a mediocre man in peacetime, Swiecki remakes himself into the perfect Party toady, a yes-man for the cynical and brutal.  For Kossecki, at one time a prisoner at Gross-Rosen, the aftermath of the war is fraught with fear and self-loathing for what he allowed himself to become in the camp.  Opportunists like Drewnowski and Pieniazek (yes the names will give you fits!) have no allegiance to party or nation, while others, like the richly- drawn Communist Szczuka, have complex feelings about the meaning of commitment in the face of Poland's apocalypse (six million Poles, including over 90% of Polish Jews, perished in the war, out of a pre-war population of 35 million). 

Among Andrzejewski's many narrative talents is the subtlety with which he moves his story forward.  Much of the action of the book takes place in the Monopole, the central hotel and restaurant in the town of Ostrowiec, an establishment previously owned, we are offhandedly informed, "by Lewkowicz...one of the wealthiest men in Ostrowiec, [who] died with the rest of his family at Treblinka." Slomka, the new manager of the Hotel Monopole, has been the beneficiary of Nazi racial policies, but no further mention of this fact is made. In 1945 there is emerging a new order, a world that is a blank slate for the ambitions, idealism, and cruelty of every man and woman. When the new world (of communism or of Polish nationalism? That remains to be seen, at least in the novel) has been created, will it be "only ashes and confusion" or "a star-like diamond./The dawning of eternal victory?"  [from the epigram by Cyrpian Norwid].  We know the answer of course--Poland's story since the war has been far more a tale of ashes than of diamonds.  And Andrzejewski as well seems to have been fully aware of the historical situation of his country:

"The fact is I don't know what this new Poland is, just yet."
"How can I put it in a few words? It's difficult, that's probably the best way to describe the tangle of conflicts and contrasts which we're faced with at every step and which we certainly shan't resolve tomorrow or the day after. ...the war is over, but the fight here is only beginning." 

Ashes and Diamonds was the third film in Andrzej Wajda's great trilogy which included A Generation (1954) and the unforgettable Kanal (1956) [Ashes and Diamonds appeared in 1958].  I saw the entire trilogy over one long, rather depressing weekend while in college.  Andrzejewski wrote the screenplay for Ashes and Diamond; the films are available through Janus and provide an emotional immersion in both wartime and post-war Polish history.

Ashes and Diamonds, the novel, is brought to us by the wonderful folks at Northwestern University Press whose series of European Classics includes novels by Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Vladimir Voinovich, and the incomparable Heinrich Boll, who has written the introduction of Andrzejewski's novel. 

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/Home/AllTitles/tabid/86/Default.aspx


George Ovitt (4/16/13)

Haitian Alphabet: One Soul’s Rising

Tired of zombie stories, movies, television series, and video games? If so, try Haitian Jean-Euphèle Milcé’s searing short novel Alphabet of the Night. It may be the antidote you need. Set in the smoke-blackened capital city of Port-au-Prince during the dying days of the Duvalier dictatorship, in the very land where the zombie (zonbi in Haitian Creole) was born, this story—for all its zombies and voodoo, for all its bloodshed and violence—offers little titillation for those weaned on Hollywood, Max Brooks, and AMC. What it offers instead is a portrait of a gravely wounded man and nation haunted by corpses, the missing, and the walking, still-talking dead. 

After the daylight murder of his lover, Lucien, Jewish shopkeeper Jeremy Assaël decides to leave his cursed and lawless homeland for good, but not before discovering the fate of his childhood friend and one-time lover, a mulatto named Fresnel, who has mysteriously disappeared. By the time the novel opens, the Duvalier family has ruled the country for nearly thirty years through a strategy of corruption and terror: an estimated 30,00o Haitians have been murdered by ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s security forces alone, thousands ‘disappeared’, and tens of thousands more exploited, terrorized, and finally forced to flee the country with nothing—quite literally—but the clothes on their backs.

Jeremy Assaël’s quest to learn the fate of his missing friend and lover takes him on a journey through the hell of contemporary Haiti in the course of which he encounters a broad sampling of the Devil’s disciples—government henchmen, foreign aid workers, Catholic priests and Brothers, Protestant missionaries, Rotarians, and even a German Consul General.  Commencing his journey on All Souls’ Day, an important Catholic holiday of alms-giving and prayers for the dead trapped in purgatory (Dante, by contrast, begins his journey through Hell on the day before Good Friday), the narrator has first to make his way through the raucous celebrations, celebrations which, while ostensibly Catholic, are in practice something much much more. Indeed in Haiti, All Souls’ Day has a special resonance for the descendants of African slaves, mixed with voodoo, as it is, and informed by the deep-seeded fear that one’s deceased loved ones have becomes zombies, dead people who cannot get across to lan guinée (literally Guinea, or West Africa), the leafy-green paradise of their ancestors. Only through the intervention of a voodoo priest and the execution of an elaborate series of rituals can the dead be so freed.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator himself meets a hougan, a voodoo priest, who helps him to complete his quest. For, like his black compatriots, Jeremy Assaël yearns to discover—if only in a secular sense—if his lover, Fresnel, has become a zonbi or crossed safely to lan guinée.

Jean-Euphèle Milcé, born in 1969 in Haiti, readily identifies himself as an ex-islander. Having qualified in Applied Linguistics at the State University of Haiti, he trained in information and library management. Jean-Euphele Milce taught Creole Literature and was in charge of the main National Library of Haiti. In 2000 he settled in Neyruz, Switzerland with his wife and children. Alphabet of the Night is published by Pushkin Press. http://www.pushkinpress.com/

Related recommendations:

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, C.L.R. James

Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, Amy Wilentz

Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian Missions, Orphanages, Fraud, Food Aid and Drug Trafficking, Timothy T. Schwartz, Ph.D.

All Souls’ Rising, Madison Smartt Bell

Peter Adam Nash

Spain: The Windmills of Sergio Prim

The Scale of Maps

 “A Knight Errant going mad for a good reason— there is neither pleasure nor merit in that. The thing is to become insane without a cause and have my lady think: If I do all this when dry, what would I not do when wet?” 

                                                              Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

 “We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called ‘real life’ in novels,” declares Vladimir Nabokov in the first of his six-part lecture series on Don Quixote.  “Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would not be real. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.” This admonition is fitting not only as a description of the dazzling surreality of Belén Gopegui’s lyrical novel The Scale of Maps (La escala de los mapas), a story as fairy a tale as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” and “Snow White,” but—perhaps more aptly—its main character, Sergio Prim, a humble, ‘prematurely old’ geographer/ philosopher with ‘a cracked mental map,’ is nothing if not a modern (more modern) Don Quixote adrift amidst the windmills of 20^th century Madrid. And, as in Don Quixote, the Spain depicted in The Scale of Maps  bears little resemblance to the familiar, geographical Spain we know, which is certainly a part of the novel’s charm. So unwonted, so unfamiliar is the story’s landscape, that one feels one has stumbled into some byzantine tale by Nabokov or Borges, say, Ada, or Ardor or “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

Quickened by hallucinations, pricked and bewildered by his own Dulcinea, a flighty fellow geographer name Brezo Varela, Sergio Prim struggles daily through the fog of his brilliant, anxious, sometimes paranoid madness to map his way to a place, a ‘hollow,’ a gap between time and space, in which love—his late-term love of Brezo—is forever safe from harm. Just as Don Quixote waxes poetic over Dulcinea’s beauty, praising her lips as coral, her teeth as pearls, her neck as alabaster, so too does Sergio Prim exult in the manifold wonders of his baffling, beautiful Brezo—his ‘little automatic umbrella,’ his ‘sea-swell,’ his ‘love without a perch.’  

Alternating deftly between first-, second-, and third-person perspective, the novel that unfolds between these covers is a marvel for its unpredictability and strangeness, for the daring versatility of Gopegui’s prose. Even at its most elusive, most confounding, its imagery and language work a kind of magic on the senses, the mind, propelling one swiftly through this adroit and bewitching tale.

Belén Gopegui,  Belén Ruiz de Gopegui, was born in the city of Madrid in 1963 as the daughter of the aerospace scientist, Luis Ruiz de Gopegui. Belén chose to study in Madrid at the Autonomous University of Madrid where she studied for her degree in Law, but before she even finished her studies, she had already decided that what she truly wanted to be was a writer. Once she finished her degree, she began her career by collaborating in the literary sections of a number of publications, including 'El Sol', for which she carried out interviews. She continued working in this manner up until the publication of her first novel, La escala de los mapas, in 1993. This novel was published by Anagrama and was met with great success, winning the Tigre Juan and the Ibero-American Santiago del Nuevo Extremo Prizes. An ardent communist, she has written numerous articles about Cuba.

She has been praised for the maturity of her prose and literary approach, her very original narrative structures, the brilliance of her metaphors, through which she shows a more than superficial understanding of the world, her scientific vocabulary, and her intimate and poetic character.*

The Scale of Maps, translated by Mark Schafer, is published by City Lights Books www.citylights.com

*www.classicspanishbooks.com 

Peter Adam Nash

The Art of Interpretation: “Lu zhai” or “Deer Park” by Wang Wei

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

by Eliot Weinberger & Octavio Paz

It was my wife, Annie, who introduced me to Eliot Weinberger through his superb collection of essays, Works on Paper—short, astute reflections on subjects ranging from India to Mateo Ricci to The Bomb.  It was also my wife who introduced me to the non-fiction of Octavio Paz, most notably his collection of essays, The Labyrinth of Solitude (with its brilliant disquisition on the extraordinarily versatile Spanish verb chingar) and his Convergences: Essay on Art and Literature.  It was therefore only natural that she, Annie, was the one to introduce me to a book that combined the strengths of both these men—as writers, translators, and critics—a work called 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei that focuses on the translation history of a single Chinese poem.

The poem ‘Lu zhai’ or ‘Deer Park’ by the wealthy Tang Dynasty Buddhist painter, calligrapher, and poet Wang Wei is one of the world’s most famous quatrains, taken from a series of twenty poems inspired by various sites along the Wang River in the Shanxi province of northeastern China. The poem, written as part of a massive horizontal landscape scroll (a genre Wei himself invented), and some 1200 years old, is now one of the most widely translated poems from the Chinese classical tradition.  It is generally believed that the title ‘Lu zhai’ is an allusion to the Deer Park in Sarnath, the site of the famous Bodhi Tree beneath which the Gautama Buddha preached his first sermon.

Everyone knows Wallace Steven’s poem “Thirteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird”.  Now consider 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, an attractively slim volume in which essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger and Mexican Nobel Laureate poet and essayist Octavio Paz have selected and critiqued a sampling—in English, Spanish, and French—of some of the most outstanding translations of this subtle, sophisticated, notoriously difficult poem.  As Weinberger remarks in his short introduction to the collection to emphasize the scale of this challenge, “Chinese prosody is largely concerned with the number of characters per line and the arrangement of tones—both of which are untranslatable.” Paz as well, in reflecting upon his own struggles to render the poem, notes: “The translation of this poem is particularly difficult, for the poem carries to an extreme the characteristics of Chinese poetry: universality, impersonality, absence of time, absence of subject.” 

Starting with W. J. B. Fletcher’s 1919 ‘The Form of the Deer’ and ending with Gary Snyder’s untitled version from 1978, this collection is extraordinary, not only for its focus on the translation of a single poem over time, with all the changes in poetic sensibility that that entails, but for Weinberger’s and Paz’s engaging, often Talmudic remarks regarding the subtleties of Chinese poetry, the strengths and weaknesses of the various renditions, and the art of translation in general, an art the particulars of which are certain to interest any student of language. While praising all of the translations by including them in the collection, the editors criticize some as attempts to “improve” upon the original, others as “poetic”(meaning Westernized, ironic), at least one as inaccurate, and still another as a typical example of Chinoiserie.   For Weinberger there are two types of translators at work in this collection: those who are scholars and read Chinese and those who are poets and don’t.  To his mind, each type has its strengths—the scholars their grasp of classical Chinese, the poets their mastery of English prosody and verse.  It is this combination that really gives life to these different, if consistently  illuminating renditions.

Surely one of the most engaging features of the book are the editors’ largely incidental reflections on the art of translation itself.  To Weinberger translation is nothing less than a spiritual exercise, and as such “…dependent on the dissolution of the translator’s ego: an absolute humility toward the text...” A good translator is but a conduit, a medium, through which the poem can speak. Of the essence of a poem, that part which survives translation, he insists, "The living matter functions somewhat like DNA, spinning out individual translations which are relatives, not clones, of the original. The relationship between original and translation is parent-child. And there are, inescapably, some translations that are overly attached to their originals, and others that are constantly rebelling.”  This is exactly what makes this collection of translations—and the editors’ tussle with them—such a pleasure to read.

Here is a brief sampling:

                    The Form of the Deer

So lone seem the hills; there is no one in sight there.

     But whence is the echo of voices I hear?

The rays of the sunset pierce slanting the forest,

            And in their reflection green mosses appear.

                                               - W.J.B. Fletcher, 1919

                           La Forêt

Dans la montagne tout est solitaire,

On entend de bien loin l'écho des voix humaines,

Le soleil qui pénètre au fond de la forêt

Reflete son éclat sur la mousee vert.

                                 -G. Margoulies, 1948

              Deer Forest Hermitage
Through the deep woods, the slanting sunlight
Casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses.
No glimpse of man in this lonely mountain,
Yet faint voices drift on the air.
                             -Chang Yin-nan & Lewis C. Walmsley, 1958

         Deep in the Mountain Wilderness

Deep in the mountain wilderness

where nobody ever comes

Only once in a great while

Something like the sound of a far off voice.

The low rays of the sun

Slip through the dark forest,

And gleam again on the shadowy moss.

                               -Kenneth Rexroth, 1970

             En la Ermita del Parque de los Venados 

No se ve gente en este monte.

Sólo se oyen, lejos, voces.

Por hos ramajes lasluz rompe.

Tendida entre las yerba brilla verde.

                           -Octavio Paz, 1974

Empty mountains:

            no one to be seen.

Yet—hear—

            human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight

            enters the dark woods;

Again shining

            on the green moss, above.

                              -Gary Snyder, 1978

Eliot Weinberger was born in New York City in 1949.  He is the primary translator of Octavio Paz into English. His anthology American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (1993) was a bestseller in Mexico, and his edition of Jorge Luis Borges's Selected Non-Fictions (1999) received the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism. In 1992, he was given PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos Award for his work in promoting Hispanic literature in the United States, and in 2000 he was the first American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.

Eliot Weinberger's publications include the collection of essays Karmic Traces: 1993-1999 and a translation of Bei Dao's Unlock (with Iona Man-Cheong), both published by New Directions in 2000. He is the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (2003).*

Octavio Paz.  Poet, essayist. Born on March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico. Paz was exposed to literature at an early age thanks to his grandfather's library. The son and grandson of political journalists, he followed the family tradition and became a writer, publishing his first volume of poetry, Luna silvestre, in 1933. Paz was also a skilled editor and helped found a literary magazine called Taller in 1938. He entered the diplomatic service in 1945 and was later appointed the Mexican ambassador to India, a position he held from 1962 to 1968. Paz resigned in protest over the Mexican government's handling of student demonstrations during the Olympic Games.
Adept at both poetry and prose, Paz moved back and forth between the two genres throughout his career. Poetry, such as Piedra de sol (1957), and critical and analytical works, such as El Laberinto de la soledad (1950) cemented his reputation as a master of language and a keen intellect. He produced more than 30 books and poetry collections in his lifetime. Paz received numerous awards for his work, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. He died on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico.

* Bio.com

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei is published by Asphodel Press 

www.asphodelpress.com/

Peter Adam Nash