Remembering Octavio Paz
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 04.16.08 | 11:35 AM ET
This week is the 10th anniversary of the death of the great Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz. The Los Angeles Times’ La Plaza blog notes that the Nobel Prize winner is being remembered in Mexico City with conferences and radio programs. For travelers, Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude is a challenging but essential book for understanding Mexican culture. Paz also wrote a travel memoir of sorts, In Light of India, based on his time as a diplomat in the country.
The New York Times once published a pithy excerpt that includes a description of Paz’s arrival in India:
We arrived in Bombay on an early morning in November 1951. I remember the intensity of the light despite the early hour, and my impatience at the sluggishness with which the boat crossed the quiet bay. An enormous mass of liquid mercury, barely undulating; vague hills in the distance; flocks of birds; a pale sky and scraps of pink clouds. As the boat moved forward, the excitement of the passengers grew. Little by little the white-and-blue architecture of the city sprouted up, a stream of smoke from a chimney, the ocher and green stains of a distant garden. An arch of stone appeared, planted on a dock and crowned with four little towers in the shape of pine trees. Someone leaning on the railing beside me exclaimed, “The Gateway of India!”
PBS has a transcript of the NewsHour’s remembrance of Paz just after his 1998 death. Noted writer Richard Rodriguez, “He was the soul of Mexico.”
Related on World Hum:
* Three Great Travel Books: Cullen Thomas’s Picks
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
