| dc.description.abstract | Though he is one the lost important writers of the Spanish language, Octavio
Paz is not well known in Poland. From his abundant literary production only two
volumes of essays and three small books of poetry have been translated into Polish.
Octavio Paz tackles the complexities of human destiny in its various historical
manifestations, both in individual and social dimensions. He received the lobel of
"Universal Mexican" for transgressing eurocentric interpretations and taking into
account other cultures in particular those of the Far East, and at the same time
merging universal values with deeply felt Mexican experiences. His work corroborates
the well known argument that only literary output deeply rooted in native tradition
can become universally meaningfull.
Octavio Paz is one of those many Latin American writers who live the problems
of modern art. His work is an example of understanding the world as "totality"
embracing history, culture and induviduality.
Recognition of those values brought him the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.
His intelectual and political biography covers most of the whole century. He believed
in the Mexican Revolution; a Marxist in the thirties, he fought in the Spanish
Civil War on the side of the Republicans. In the 1940-s, however, he distanced himself
from Socialist Realism and slowly drifted towards liberal positions tinged with
romantic anachronisms.
His artistic biography, on the other hand is closly connected with the main literary
trends of our century, from Surrealism to Structuralism.
Octavio Paz essays and articles are creative interpretations of XX-century ideas
and science, in particular when it comes to Mexican and Latin American problems.
He understands poetry to be an attempt at opening the frontiers of human existence, as the highest inspiration of every human activity. The purpose of poetry is
not to dominate language and subject but set them free and recover their original
magic.
The presence and importance of various philosophical themes is evident in
Octavio Paz poetry. Solitude and efforts to defeat it with the help of love and
poetry; the dialectical tension between solitude and solidarity with others, life and
death. Those and many other problems are present in the poet's lirical works and
in his essays, in particular in The Labyrinth of Solitude. | pl_PL |
