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Back You are here: Home Columns Columns Allyn Hunt Paz thought the right blind and deaf, and was appalled by the insistent totalitarianism embraced by the left

Paz thought the right blind and deaf, and was appalled by the insistent totalitarianism embraced by the left

“The Last Giant” silently boomed the huge black headline of Newsweek International’s cover story on the death, April 4, 1998, of a man who could have won the Nobel Prize for either poetry or prose.  He won it mostly for his poetry, though at home and beyond he was best known for his prose, which was uniquely culturally probing, challenging and eloquent.

In many ways that is unfortunate.  For his poetry is dizzying in its reach, its versatility, and its lyrical boldness and soaring excellence. 

We are of course speaking of historian, poet and political, aesthetic and cultural analyst Octavio Paz, born 100 years ago March 31, 1914. His death in 1998 left an echoing space on the international literary scene that no one seems to have even tried to fill.  That is not to say there are not scores of admirable Mexican writers.  Certainly there are.  But Paz, despite controversies some of his work stirred, bestrode the Mexican – and Latin American – intellectual and aesthetic world like a philosopher king.

And even those who sharply differed with him praised him as his death – by cancer at the age of 84 – was observed in a manner reserved for a head of state.  His coffin, draped with a huge Mexican flag stood in the Palace of Fine Arts as Mexico’s elite paid homage.  Thousands of Mexican citizens, some carrying copies of his books, in long lines patiently waited for hours to silently do the same.  The president spoke, also other national luminaries. Not a few of these had ideological and philosophical differences with Paz.  One of those was Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who said, “(So ended) a torrent of beauty that has saturated the 20th century.”

Paz and Garcia Marquez clashed over Marquez’s fidelity to Fidel Castro.  Thus, the many who had burned Paz in effigy in the streets of Mexico City early on for having the temerity to probe into the Spanish and indigenous roots of the Mexican character and culture, mixed with others who put aside their outrage at having their rabid political stances dissected by one of their own.  Paz defined Marxism as “an intellectual vice … if there is a reactionary sector in Latin America, it is the leftist intellectual.  They are people who have no memory.  They never admit to ever making a mistake.  (Marxism) is the superstition of the 20th century.” 

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