Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists "who drew their own maps of the world." For Latin America's foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center of a global mandala, a cultural configuration that, in his life and work, he has traced to its furthest reaches: to Spain, as a young Marxist during the Civil War; to San Francisco and New York in the early 1940s; to Paris, as a surrealist, in the postwar years; to India and Japan in 1952, and to the East again as his country's ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968; and to various universities in the United States throughout the 1970s. A great synthesizer, the rich diversity of Paz's thought is shown here in all its astonishing complexity. Among the sixty-seven selections in this volume, a gathering in English of his most essential poems drawn from nearly fifty years' work, are Muriel Rukeyser's now classic version of "Sun Stone" and new translations by editor Weinberger of Blanco" and "Maithuna." And since for Paz, forever in motion, there can be no such thing as a "definitive text," all the poems have been revised to conform to the poet's most recent changes in the original Spanish. Besides those by Rukeyser and Weinberger, the translations in the Selected Poems are by G. Aroul, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, William Carlos Williams, and Monique Fong Wust.

Obra poética

Octavio Paz; Eliot Weinberger; Guy Aroul; New Directions Publishing

Paz, Octavio

New Directions Publishing Corporation

United States, United States of America

New Directions book, New York, 1984

New York, New York State, 1984

Fifth printing, New York, 1984

First Edition, PS, 1984

5th ed., New York, 1997

[curator]lenscriv@archive.org[/curator][date]20170227172037[/date][state]approved[/state][comment]199[/comment]

Includes index.

The bird -- Two bodies -- Poet's epitaph -- The street -- The hand of day opens -- Fable -- Native stone -- Object lesson -- In Uxmal -- Riprap -- The poet's works III, IV, VII, XI, XII, The blue bouquet -- Hurry -- Plain -- Capital -- Obsidian butterfly -- A poet -- Huastec lady -- Toward the poem -- Hymn among the ruins -- Is there no way out? The river -- Sun stone -- Dawn -- Here -- Landscape -- Certainty -- Touch -- Duration -- Last dawn -- Salamander -- Happiness in Herat -- Apparition -- In the Lodi gardens -- The other -- Vrindaban -- Village -- Daybreak -- Nightfall -- On reading John Cage -- Writing -- Concord -- Exclamation -- Wind from all compass points -- Madrigal -- With eyes closed -- Transit -- Maithuna -- The key of water -- Sunday on the island of Elephanta -- Blanco -- The grove -- Immemorial landscape -- Trowbridge street -- Objects and apparitions -- Return -- In the middle of this phrase -- The petrifying petrified -- San Ildefonso nocturne -- A draft of shadows -- Flame, speech -- Sight, touch -- Homage to Claudius Ptolemy -- Stars and cricket -- Wind and water and stone -- Epitaph for no stone -- This side.

Contains almost 200 collected poems in both Spanish and English.

[v. 1.] 1935-1970
2. 1969-1998.

2023-06-28