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from "Mutra" (1952) to recent Sanskrit adaptations ... Read more

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Poetic Ambassador
A Tale of Two Gardens is a collection of poems dealing with Nobel laureate Octavio Paz relationship with the great nation of India.He made many trips there over the years.Paz was also the Mexican ambassador to India. (He resigned the position in 1968 to protest government assault onprotesters.)There were still later sojourns to India afterwards.Mutrais a really strong poem.It is a flower that grows with each subsequentreading.Few cities have ever been so aptly honoured.Another of thepoems I like is The Balcony.Wind From All Compass Points is anotherstandout.The whole collection is a grand achievement.India is the mostenduring civilization on the planet.It is only fitting that one of themost enduring poets of the twentieth century should write a poetic tribute. These poems were written over a period of forty years.The love andpassion Paz feels for Indian culture and peoples is recurrent in thesepoems.This was truly his second home.It was the second garden so tospeak.And from this love of India came a great gift of poetry for therest of the world to read and know.

Sensual and evocative
Once again Octavio Paz expresses his love and passion for India and things Indian but this time through his poetry. They style is fluid, sensual and evocative, add to it a plethora of colorful imageries. ... Read more

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Octavio Paz, uno de los mayores poetas del siglo XX y profundo conocedor de las aventuras artisticas de su tiempo, escribe sobre la obra de Marcel Duchamp un libro ya clasico, El castillo de la pureza, publicado en los anos sesenta. Mas tarde, en 1973, Paz vuelve sobre el texto y lo revisa a fondo y escribe una segunda parte. Ambos textos fueron revisados, corregidos y ampliados mas tarde, y esa es la version que se publica hoy en el volumen que el lector tiene en sus manos. Marcel Duchamp fue un revolucionario no solo en el arte, como lo demuestra su anticipacion a muchas de las actuales tendencias, sino tambien en la relacion entre el artista y la vida. Del Gran Vidrio a los ensamblajes, Duchamp mantuvo una actitud distanciada y secreta, una ocultacion de la propia obra que solo ahora recobra toda su significacion: silencio que es un lenguaje, falsa inactividad que es critica e ironia y que, poniendo en crisis la figura misma del artista, del mito del arte, desarregla las nociones adquiridas, abre una riesgosa y deslumbrante zona a la inteligencia creadora, propone un nuevo modo de ver. Es imposible entrar en los cambiantes espacios del arte que se esta haciendo hoy sin atender a las claves que nos dan el silencio y la obra de Duchamp, su accion actualisima y saludablemente perturbadora a la que nos acercanos de la mano de Octavio Paz en este libro cada vez mas imprescindible. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Absolutely brilliant.
Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows (New Directions, 1979)

I am kicking myself for having had this book in my collection for long enough that I don�t remember buying it and not getting around to it until now. Paz is the most exciting poet I�ve run across since discovering the work of Ira Sadoff five years ago. His work, more than capably translated here by Eliot Weinberger (with a few translations from others thrown in for good measure), is a perfect blend of the art and craft of poetry. It is also the finest overtly political work I have read since Aime Cesaire last put pen to paper. Paz understands that if the poetry is good enough, the message of the poetry will come out on its own, something nine hundred ninety-nine out of every thousand political poets never grasp. Those who would dispute it need only read the title poem here and hold it up against the best works by inferior political poets. The difference is stunning, and obvious.

When Paz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1990, the committee stated that his writing was characterized by �sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.� Indeed. This is poetry the way it�s meant to be. **** 1/2

One of the best books of Spanish poetry
Excelent translation. Like "Eagle or Sun", "A Draft orShadows" is the best Paz's poetry. Without doubt, some of the bestpoems I have ever read. East and West, Water and Stone, White and Black...encounter each other... on the other side. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A major disjunction
Politically hyper-correct work aspiring to historio-anthropo-philosopho-religio-spiritual final word on the state of the world today, written in a tedious, nebulous style typical of the "intellectual" and academic texts, heavy on the verbiage but sparse of ideas. We are obviously to be shocked by references to selected body parts, but regrettably such references had been around for too long to still have any shock value. Any thoughts which may be present are buried under classroom style erudition, based upon quotations from randomly selected books, not on the expertise of any subject. And to top it all we get a lengthy comparison of Protestant Christianity and Buddhism, based upon the premise that both are religions and both started as a break from existing religion - so there is a conjunction - but then follows a multitude of disjunctions, leading to the final conclusion that perhaps this comparison is rather meaningless. Well, so it is, as one could have seen from the very beginning, so what was the point anyhow?

The leading idea seems to be lamenting the decrepit condition of culture in the Western world. Or it may be an attempt to write a treatise on the importance of rites in the social life of humans. Perhaps it is a meditation on the conflict between the spiritual and material elements in the human nature. I was not able to extract anything substantial from this mass of casually tangled snippets of information on the Tantra, Spanish Baroque, Provencal Troubadours, Taoism, Marxism and Parisian revolt of 1968. Plus, I became quickly fatigued by the abundant repetitions.

Of course I'm aware that Paz is a poet and not an anthropologist, but then why tackle the matter which is beyond the scope of his competence? Perhaps the writing of this book was intended as anther sign of disjunctions prevalent in the West, as Paz tries to assert. Perhaps the nature of Spanish language is so different from the English that the meaning got lost in translation. Fortunately this bookis very short, and one may read it as a document of ideas fashionable at the time of its writing.


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Vislumbres de la India es el primer ensayo unitario que publica Octavio Paz despues de La llama doble. Si en La llama doble Octavio Paz atendia a la relacion entre amor y erotismo y a su significado ultimo, en Vislumbres de la India lleva a cabo una recapitulacion no solo de su periodo de residencia continuada en dicho pais -ante el que fue embajador desde 1962 hasta 1968- y sus viajes anteriores y posteriores a el, sino tambien de la huella cultural, artistica, politica y filosofica que la India ha dejado en su vivencia, y, mas alla o mas aca de ello, un examen de que cosa sea en si la India. Una India vivida en cuanto experiencia personal, en los reveladores capitulos autobiograficos que abren y cierran el volumen; una India, por otro lado, examinada en su complejidad nacional, religiosa e historica. Testimonio de la agudeza analitica de Octavio Paz, Vislumbres de la India supone ademas un reto para el lector occidental: al ampliar nuestro horizonte mediante la presentacion de una realidad tan distinta como la del inmenso pais, nos incita tambien a ahondar en la fertil discrepancia entre nuestra vision del mundo y las que ahi imperan, a trazar analogias o a perfilar contrastes que, al subvertir nuestra rutina, pueden acaso permitirnos ver en nuestro entorno fecundas posibilidades latentes. El dialogo con la India es asi, en la lucida y diafana prosa de Octavio Paz, tambien un dialogo con la condicion humana, tambien un dialogo con nosotros mismos. ... Read more

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De que se rien los dioses totonacas? Por que dejo Sor Juana de escribir? Cuales fueron las batallas artisticas e ideologicas de Rufino Tamayo? ... A cada pregunta, Octavio Paz responde con un ensayo que es, al tiempo, una puerta de entrada al conjunto de su obra y un mundo alucinante en si mismo. Ademas, esta antologia incluye un repaso por seis decadas de la poesia, inagotable, del unico Premio Nobel mexicano de Literatura. Su obra esta viva, es un refugio para abstraerse de la sinrazon del mundo y una brujula para orientarse en el. Esta antologia quiere incitar a la lectura de Octavio Paz entre los jovenes y aspira a despejar algunos de los muchos malentendidos y cliches que pesan sobre su vida y su obra. ... Read more

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Les achats comprennent une adhésion à l'essai gratuite au club de livres de l'éditeur, dans lequel vous pouvez choisir parmi plus d'un million d'ouvrages, sans frais. Le livre consiste d'articles Wikipedia sur : Octavio Paz, Francisco Azuela, Alberto Isaac, Francisco Javier Clavijero, Elena Poniatowska, Sergio Pitol, Alejandro Galindo, Ignacio Retes, Carlos Fuentes, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, José Vasconcelos, Juana Inés de La Cruz, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón Y Mendoza, Salvador Elizondo, Nancy Cárdenas, Emilio García Riera, Rosario Castellanos, Carlos Monsiváis, Claudio Isaac, Dr. Atl, Rius, Alí Chumacero, Vicente Leñero, José Emilio Pacheco, José Agustín, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Alfonso García Robles, Abel Quezada, Manuel González Casanova, Andrés Henestrosa, Paco Ignacio Taibo I, Miguel Ruiz, Juan Rulfo, Emilio Carballido, Margarita López Portillo, Alfonso Reyes, Ikram Antaki, Carlos de Sigüenza Y Góngora, Laura Esquivel, Luis Zapata, Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Clementina Díaz Y de Ovando, Jordi Soler, Enrique Serna, Fernando Del Paso, Guadalupe Amor, Edmundo O'gorman, Senez Paz, Tomás Segovia, Mariano Azuela, Vilma Fuentes, Myriam Moscona, Fernando Serrano Migallón, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, Pablo Cerda, Guillermo Bonfil, Francisco González Bocanegra, Jacobo Zabludovsky, Hermann Bellinghausen, Juan Manuel Servín, Carlos Tello Diaz, Ignacio Burgoa Orihuela. Non illustré. Mises à jour gratuites en ligne. Extrait : Francisco Azuela Espinoza (né à Leon, Guanajuato, Mexique, 8 Mars 1948), est un écrivain et poète mexicain, avec des œuvres publiées en plusieurs langues.Il était un diplomate en poste à l'ambassade du Mexique au Costa Rica et le Honduras (1973-1983), et décoré par le gouvernement hondurien de l'Ordre du Libérateur de l'Amérique centrale Francisco Morazán, dans le grade officier. Il a couru hondurienne Académie de la Langue et Littérature Internationale Prix Cervantes d'Espagne en 1981. Directeur de la Bibl...http://booksllc.net/?l=fr ... Read more