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By Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger
in 1951, Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet who would win the Nobel Prize in 1990, was leading a romantic 20th century artistic existence: Posted to his country's embassy in Paris, the minor diplomat and self-described "young barbarian poet" had plenty of time to write and immerse himself in the artistic and philosophical milieu of the city's cafes and bars. And he was blessedly forgotten by his superiors. The usual two-year call to transfer posts never came, as six wonderful years passed by. Then someone in the Foreign Office lightly shuffled a file, and Paz found himself abruptly transferred to the new Mexican mission in India. His brief stay in that country (he was soon transferred again, to Tokyo) and his later stint as ambassador to India, from 1962 to 1968, formed the basis for a cultural relationship he explores in his new book, "In Light of India." It is a precise, learned and lucid series of essays.
Paz takes great pains to remind his readers that "In Light of India" is not a memoir, "but rather an essay that attempts ... to answer a question that goes beyond personal anecdotes: How does a Mexican writer, at the end of the Twentieth Century, view the immense reality of India?" Paz's reflection is a subtle introduction, a sort of intellectual Baedeker for any Westerner whose knowledge of India is no deeper than that of, say, the Beatles when they deplaned into the arms of the maharishi. He does this with a well-balanced examination of both the strange and the familiar, finding commonalities between Mexico and India in the everyday realm of food -- the simple chili, so crucial to both cuisines -- and the more complicated arena of politics, where both India and Mexico have thrown off colonial rule and struggled to build a nation. Paz saves his most heartfelt writing for Indian art, where the precision and feeling of a poet shine through in, for instance, descriptions of Hindu carvings: "Shiva smiles from a beyond where time is a small drifting cloud."
It's rare that the acknowledgments in a book will have much effect on a reader, but as you scan the names of the well-known and unknown Paz thanks for introducing him to Indian society, you simply can't help thinking what a book his true memoir would be. For all the accomplishment of this collection of essays, it remains a slightly removed construct, a well-paved passage to the mind of India; there's a memoir within Paz's reach, full of character and incident, that might take us into its immense heart.
-- Edward Neuert
Edward Neuert is a writer who lives in Burlington, Vt. |
