33 Facts About Octavio Paz

1.

Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican poet and diplomat.

2.

Octavio Paz's family was a prominent liberal political family in Mexico, with Spanish and indigenous Mexican roots.

3.

Ireneo Paz became an intellectual and journalist, starting several newspapers, where he was publisher and printer.

4.

Ireneo's son, Octavio Paz Solorzano, supported Emiliano Zapata during the Revolution, and published an early biography of him and the Zapatista movement.

5.

Octavio Paz was named for him, but spent considerable time with his grandfather Ireneo, since his namesake father was active fighting in the Mexican Revolution; his father died in a violent fashion.

6.

Octavio Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather Ireneo's library, filled with classic Mexican and European literature.

7.

In 1936, Octavio Paz abandoned his law studies, and left Mexico City for Yucatan to work at a school in Merida.

8.

Octavio Paz showed his solidarity with the Republican side, and against the fascists led by Francisco Franco and supported by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

9.

In 1943, Octavio Paz received a Guggenheim Fellowship and used it to study at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States.

10.

Octavio Paz returned to Mexico City in 1954, where he wrote his great poem "Piedra de sol" in 1957, and published Libertad bajo palabra, a compilation of his poetry up to that time.

11.

Octavio Paz was again sent to Paris in 1959, and in 1962, he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.

12.

In New Delhi, as Ambassador of Mexico to India, Octavio Paz completed several works, including El mono gramatico and Ladera este.

13.

In 1968, Octavio Paz resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the Mexican government's massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco; after seeking refuge in Paris, he again returned to Mexico in 1969, where he founded his magazine Plural with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers.

14.

From 1969 to 1970, Octavio Paz was Simon Bolivar Professor at the University of Cambridge.

15.

Octavio Paz was a visiting lecturer during the late 1960s, and the AD White Professor-at-Large from 1972 to 1974 at Cornell.

16.

Octavio Paz was editor of that until his death in 1998, when the magazine closed.

17.

Octavio Paz won the 1977 Jerusalem Prize for literature on the theme of individual freedom.

18.

Once good friends with novelist Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz became estranged from him in the 1980s in a disagreement over the Sandinistas, whom Octavio Paz opposed and Fuentes supported.

19.

Octavio Paz died of cancer on April 19,1998, in Mexico City.

20.

Guillermo Sheridan, who in 1998 was named by Paz as director of the Octavio Paz Foundation, published a book, Poeta con paisaje, with several biographical essays about the poet.

21.

Octavio Paz's poetry has been translated into English by Samuel Beckett, Charles Tomlinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser and Mark Strand.

22.

Octavio Paz wrote poetry about his other passion, modern painting, dedicating poems to the work of Balthus, Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta.

23.

Ilan Stavans wrote that Octavio Paz was "the quintessential surveyor, a Dante's Virgil, a Renaissance man".

24.

Octavio Paz is horrified to discover the poisonous nature of the garden's beauty.

25.

Octavio Paz adapted the play from an 1844 short story by American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, which was entitled "Rappaccini's Daughter"; he combined Hawthorne's story with sources from the Indian poet Vishakadatta and influences from Japanese Noh theatre, Spanish autos sacramentales, and the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

26.

Originally, Octavio Paz supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, but after learning of the murder of one of his friends by the Stalinist secret police, he became gradually disillusioned.

27.

Octavio Paz criticized the Mexican government and leading party that dominated the nation for most of the twentieth century.

28.

Politically, Octavio Paz was a social democrat, who became increasingly supportive of liberal ideas without ever renouncing to his initial leftist and romantic views.

29.

Octavio Paz was "very slippery for anyone thinking in rigid ideological categories," Yvon Grenier wrote in his book on Octavio Paz's political thought.

30.

An advocate of fundamental transformation in the way we see ourselves and modern society, Octavio Paz was a promoter of incremental change, not revolution.

31.

Octavio Paz spoke broadly in favor of a "military solution" to the uprising of January 1994, and hoped that the "army would soon restore order in the region".

32.

The magazine Barandal appeared in August 1931, put together by Rafael Lopez Malo, Salvador Toscano, Arnulfo Martinez Lavalle and Octavio Paz; all of them were not yet in their youth, except for Salvador Toscano, who was a renowned writer thanks to his parents.

33.

Octavio Paz Solorzano became known in his circle as the occasional author of literary narratives that appeared in the Sunday newspaper add-in El Universal, as well as Ireneo Paz which was the name that gave a street in Mixcoac identity.