Dispatches from the Republic of Letters

50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Daniel Simon, Daniel Simon

• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781646050345
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

"The centrifugal pull of great literature, as embodied by the work of these twenty-five writers, draws us into a fuller realization of our humanity." ¬– Daniel Simon, editor-in-chief of World Literature Today For the last fifty years, The Neustadt Prize has been one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, second only to the Nobel. Poets, novelists, and playwrights from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Orhan Pamuk to Czeslaw Milosz and Dubravka Ugresic are listed among the ranks of laureate. Now, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters gathers the acceptance speeches of these twenty-five pioneering writers into one volume, edited and with an introduction by World Literature Today editor-in-chief Daniel Simon.

OCTAVIO PAZ

THE 1982 LAUREATE

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) was born and raised in Mixcoac, part of present-day Mexico City. His family supported Emiliano Zapata, and after Zapata’s assassination they were forced into exile in the United States. Paz was only nineteen when he published his first collection of poetry, entitled Luna Silvestre (1933). During his long career, Paz founded the literary journals Barandal (1932) and Taller (1938) and the magazines Plural (1970) and Vuelta (1975). In 1945 he began working as a diplomat for the Mexican government in such places as Paris, Tokyo, Geneva, and Mumbai. His travels influenced much of his work, and he published many of his books while working abroad. Paz’s numerous collections of poetry include Entre la piedra y la flor (1941), Piedra de sol (1957; Eng. Sun Stone, 1991), and Renga (1972). Additionally, Paz wrote many essays, short stories, and plays, including El laberinto de la soledad (1950; Eng. The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961), Corriente alterna (1967; Eng. Alternating Current, 1973), and La hija de Rappaccini (1956). In addition to the Neustadt Prize in 1982, Paz was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.

Considering all this, in the convulsed and intolerant modern world we inhabit, the Neustadt Prize is an example of true civilization.

—Octavio Paz

The Turning House
Octavio Paz

for Ivar and Astrid

There is a wooden house

on the plain of Oklahoma.

Each night the house turns

into an island of the Baltic Sea,

a stone that fell from a fabled sky.

Burnished by Astrid’s glances,

ignited by Ivar’s voice,

the stone slowly turns in the shadow:

it is a sunflower and burns.

A cat,

returned from Saturn,

goes through the wall and disappears

between the pages of a book.

The grass has turned into night,

the night has turned into sand,

the sand has turned into water.

Then

Ivar and Astrid lift up architectures

—cubes of echoes, weightless forms—

some of them called poems,

others drawings, others conversations

with friends from Málaga, Mexico

and other planets.

These forms

wander and have no feet,

glance and have no eyes,

speak and have no mouth.

The sunflower

turns and does not move,

the island

ignites and is extinguished,

the stone

flowers,

the night closes,

the sky opens.

Dawn

wets the lids of the plain.

(1982/83)

Translation from the Spanish by Ivar Ivask

Octavio Paz: The Poet as Philosopher
Manuel Durán

The poet Derek Walcott remarked recently, “The greatest writers have been at heart parochial, provincial in their rootedness…. Shakespeare remains a Warwickshire country boy; Joyce a minor bourgeois from Dublin, Dante’s love of Florence was very intense. Hardy’s place, of course, was rural Essex: ‘I can understand / Borges’s blind love for Buenos Aires, / How a man feels the veins of his city swell in his head’ (Midsummer ’81).”¹ There are many books and poems by Paz that proclaim his rootedness, his intimacy with Mexican traditions, landscapes, people. Books like The Labyrinth of Solitude, for instance, or Posdata could not have been written by anyone outside the mainstream of Mexican culture. No foreign observer could have given such books the impact and urgency they possess. Paz is not content with describing some of the deepest and most relevant aspects of Mexican psychology; he involves the reader in the system of values he describes because he is himself involved in it for better or for worse, inescapably. It is ancient Mexican culture with its circular patterns that molds a long poem such as Sun Stone; it is the experience of being an adolescent in and around Mexico City that imparts distinctive flavor to Paz’s “Nocturno de San Ildefonso.”

Yet very often at the conclusion of Paz’s sustained efforts to explore his roots and the origins of his culture, a change of mood and of ideas begins to emerge. From the poet’s direct and intimate experience he leads us toward a deeper knowledge of what it is to be a Mexican living and working in the present century, within a culture as tragic and fragmented as it is rich and complex. But the poet’s experience allows him to express also much that belongs to our experience. His exploration of Mexican existential values permits him to open a door to an understanding of other countries and other cultures. What began as a slow, almost microscopic examination of self and of a single cultural tradition widens unexpectedly, becoming universal without sacrificing its unique characteristic.

This is a special gift, a gift few poets possess. The inescapable conclusion is that Paz belongs to a select group of poets who can expand the limits of poetry until they invade the realm of philosophy. Paz is a poetphilosopher, a philosophical poet. Such a gift has never been widespread. Among the classics, for instance, Lucretius would qualify, but not Catullus. Dante was a philosophical poet, and so were Shakespeare and Milton, Donne and Eliot. In each of these instances we find a persistent exploration of nature, of the place of human beings in nature. What is our place in the cosmos? Are we, as we often think in our pride, the masters of nature, the almost perfect creation of a protecting and loving God? Are we intruders barely tolerated? Are we, as Shakespeare claims in a somber moment, no more to the gods than flies are to wanton children, flies which they kill as a pastime? Or are we enveloped by the very same love which, as Dante explains, is the force that moves the Sun and the other stars? Philosophical poets may differ widely with respect to the answers they give to the riddles of life. What they have in common, however, is a mixture of curiosity and awe, and this is much more important than what separates them.

The philosopher-poet is always ready to travel with his mind and his body, through time and through space. Octavio Paz has traveled as widely as he has written, and as Anna Balakian has said, he “belongs to that new breed of humans, more numerous each day, who are freeing themselves of ethnic myopia and walking the earth as inhabitants of the planet, regardless of national origin or political preferences.”²

It is entirely possible that all human beings are born poets, born philosophers, born scientists, but that circumstances and a poor education shrink or atrophy the imagination and the curiosity that would sustain such activities. Fortunately for us, Paz was a poet and a curious observer since childhood and has managed to retain a child’s heart and vision. A sense of being open to the world was among his childhood’s more precious gifts. Paz has said about himself:

As a boy I lived in a place called Mixcoac, near the capital. We lived in a large house with a garden. Our family had been impoverished by the revolution and the civil war. Our house, full of antique furniture, books, and other objects, was gradually crumbling to bits. As rooms collapsed we moved the furniture into another. I remember that for a long time I lived in a spacious room with part of one of the walls missing. Some magnificent screens protected me inadequately from wind and rain. A creeper invaded my room…. A premonition of that surrealist exhibition where there was a bed lying in a swamp.³

I see in this room invaded by rain, wind and plants a symbol of the poet’s career, always open to the wind coming from every direction of the compass, always exposed to the outside world and the forces of nature—a room quite the opposite of a fortress or an ivory tower. From this exposed vantage point the poet ventures forth. His goal is not only to see infinity in a grain of sand, as William Blake proposed, but at the same time to describe the texture and color of the grain of sand, to see its reflection in his eye—and ours.

Paz knows that human beings have many roots, not a single taproot, fibrous roots that connect them with many cultures, many pasts. The themes, meanings, images by which poetic imagination seeks to penetrate to the heart of reality—the permanence and mystery of human suffering, human hope, joy and wonder—reach the poet from many sources. The poet sees existence with the double vision of tragedy, the good and the evil forever mixed. He is constantly under strain, admitting dire realities and conscious of bleak possibilities. Yet he is aware that love, knowledge, art, poetry allow us to experience the unity and final identity of being.

Ultimately Paz as a poet is a master of language, yet one who recognizes that language is also our shaper and ruler. If the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer defined man as the animal who can create language and myths, we can also state that it is language, myths, poetry that have created man, that have made man into a speaking, mythmaking, poetry-writing animal. It is through language that Paz faces the world, sees the world as a unity, confronts the diversities of culture and explains their apparent oppositions and contradictions, their conjunctions and disjunctions, as different responses to the same identical questions. To understand is to see correspondences and patterns, structures of symmetry and dissymmetry, constellations of signs in space and in time—yet anything can be expressed and related through words. In Paz’s manysplendored vision the poet is capable of flying through space and time, because like the magical monkey of Hindu legend, Hanumān, he has invented grammar and language.

From above, in his vertical flight, drunk with light and with love, the poet contemplates the fusion of opposites, the marriage of Heaven and Hell, the radiance of the void, the dark luminosity where life and death meet. The movements of planets, the patterns of seasons and nature, are circular, yet the circle becomes a spiral pointing toward vaster spaces where everything becomes possible, where I become the Other, where the labyrinth of mirrors fuses into a single blinding light. We learn to say “no” and “yes” at the same time, because through poetry we reach the certain knowledge that Becoming and Being are two facets of the same reality. As Paz describes it, “The spirit / Is an invention of the body / The body / An invention of the world / The world / An invention of the spirit” (Blanco).⁴ Within this is language, poetic language, the language of myths and of passion that has made us what we are. Language is a huge shuttle going back and forth, weaving our world, and the poet is at the center of this operation. “By passion the world is bound, by passion too it is released,” reads the epigraph from Buddhist tradition (The Hevajra Tantra) that frames what is perhaps Paz’s most famous poem, Blanco. As a poet, Paz is the master of words. Word of passion, words of wisdom. They can create our ultimate vision; they can also erase it.

*

An English poet-philosopher, John Donne, wisely warns us that when we hear the bell toll for someone’s death we should realize that it tolls for us, that someone else’s death in a subtle but certain way diminishes us, partially kills us, for we are part and parcel of the fabric which this death unravels. I would like to point out a reverse situation: when a poet’s work is heard, understood, applauded, it is a triumph for life, a celebration of Being, and therefore it is our victory, our glory, that is heard in the joyous pealing of the bell.

This celebration of Being is instinctively clear to the philosophical poet because he or she is often conscious of speaking, feeling, writing not only for himself or herself, but for all of us. Sympathy unites the philosophical poet to other human beings that he or she may not know and with whom he or she may superficially have little in common. A capacity for generalized feelings, visions, ideas is another feature of the philosophical poet that makes his or her voice different from the voices of other poets. The philosophical poet sees and describes a specific flower, a yellow rose or a purple iris, and at the same time there is a space in his mind, in his imagination, in his soul, where the rose and the iris come closer and closer to a perfect flower, the Platonic flower described by Mallarmé as “l’absente de tout bouquet”—the flower that is the essence of all flowers and therefor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Neustadt Prizes and World Literature Today
• Laureates of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1970–2020
• Preface
• Introduction: The Neustadt Prize on the World Stage
• Giuseppe Ungaretti
• Gabriel García Márquez
• Francis Ponge
• Elizabeth Bishop
• Czesław Miłosz
• Josef Škvorecký
• Octavio Paz
• Paavo Haavikko
• Max Frisch
• Raja Rao
• Tomas Tranströmer
• João Cabral de Melo Neto
• Kamau Brathwaite
• Assia Djebar
• Nuruddin Farah
• David Malouf
• Álvaro Mutis
• Adam Zagajewski
• Claribel Alegría
• Patricia Grace
• Duo Duo
• Rohinton Mistry
• Mia Couto
• Dubravka Ugrešić
• Edwidge Danticat
• Acknowledgments
• The 1969 Charter
• About the Neustadt Family
• The Neustadt Silver Eagle Feather
• Laureates by Country and Their Nominating Jurors
• Recommended Reading
• Contributors’ Index