The Year of Octavio Paz (Part 5)

Alberto Ruy-Sanchez on Octavio Paz

Later this week, Wordfest will be joining The Casa México in Alberta Foundation to pay homage to Octavio Paz in celebration of the centenary of the birth of the Nobel Prize-winning poet, writer, essayist and diplomat. The evening will be held at the Kahanoff Centre (105 12 Ave SE #200, Calgary) on May 29, 5:30pm, and will feature an artistic response from Kris Demeanor and a round-table discussion on Paz’s life and work.

The event is also an opportunity to reflect on how Octavio Paz has influenced readers and writers who draw inspiration from his work or have had the good fortune of meeting or crossing paths with the esteemed writer.

Interview with Wordfest alumnus Alberto Ruy-Sanchez

This week, we had the pleasure of interviewing Mexican writer Alberto Ruy-Sanchez about his impressions of Octavio Paz. Ruy-Sánchez writes fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and his books have been translated into several languages. He was the managing editor of the Mexican magazine Vuelta, edited by Octavio Paz, from 1984 to 1987. In November 2006, he received a lifetime achievement award for his work as the founder and editor of Artes de México, a leading cultural project in the Americas.

Ruy-Sanchez is also a Festival favourite, having appeared at Wordfest in 1998, 2003 and 2010. Over email this weekend, he shared some personal recollections of Octavio Paz with whom he was a close friend for almost two decades before his passing.

Q: How do you think Octavio Paz has influenced or inspired you?

He was for me a great creative presence. And Octavio Paz is much more than an influence: he opened new spaces for Latin American Literature and even for Spanish Literature. He introduced in our language all the discoveries of the european avant guard and of american modernism, and from there he invented new ways of creating poetry as a tool to explore human dimensions that no other kind of writing can reach.

Q: How would you describe Paz’s writing?

He made of poetry a bisturi of cultural differences at the edges of the human condition. That is, as a creator, as a thinker and essayist, he was a poet too in the sense that Aristotle says a historian writes on what happened, but a poet also writes about what could happen and should happen. So, it’s not so much that he had a point of view but a wider and deeper thing: a vision.

That is why he was capable of having ideas beyond his contemporaries: he wrote about the Soviet Gulag in the 1940s, when all the other Latin American writers loved Stalin and Castro. From the 1950s onward, he wrote about the false illusions of Progress and the destruction of the Environment in the name of Progress. He wrote about Global Warming in the sixties, and about Oriental Eroticism, far beyond what his older friends Bataille and Breton have written since the seventies. When he died in 1998, his focus turned to analyzing the dangers of the deification of the Global Markets. To simplify, as Eliot Weinberger puts it: if great writers are like great mountains, Octavio Paz is the Everest.

Alberto Ruy-Sanchez is the author of Una introducción a Octavio Paz. Spanish-language readers interested in knowing more about Ruy-Sanchez’s relationship with Octavio Paz are invited to consult this article on the subject: “La conversación tras las Azaleas“. Nexos, enero 2014, México. He also wrote the forthcoming book, Poetics of Wonder: Passage to Mogador.

Wordfest’s mini-series on Octavio Paz includes the following articles:

– The Year of Octavio Paz [Part 1]
– The Significance of Beginnings [Part 2]
– Octavio Paz: Philosophy & Poetry Interpreted [Part 3]
– Mexican Literature “after Octavio Paz” [Part 4]
– Alberto Ruy Sanchez on Octavio Paz [Part 5]