Octavio Paz - In Light of India

CONTENTS

OCTAVIO PAZ was born in Mexico in 1914 and is best known as a poet and essayist. He is also a professor, critic and translator, has served as a diplomat and was Mexican ambassador to France and India. Like Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, Paz is one of those Latin American literary giants whose work has influenced not only their own politics and culture but those of the world. Among a dozen volumes available in English translation is his study of Mexican culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and Convergences essays on art and literature. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. He lives in Mexico City.

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First published with the title Vislumbres de la India by
Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., Barcelona, in 1995

This edition first published in 1997 by
The Harvill Press
84 Thornhill Road
London N1 1RD

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Copyright Editorial Seix Barral, S.A, 1995
English translation copyright Eliot Weinberger, 1997

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781860464256

The Hymn of Creation from The Wonder that was India by
A. L. Basham, copyright Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954
reprinted by permission of the publisher

Excerpt from Sweeny Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon
in Collected Poems 19091962 by T. S. Eliot,
copyright Harcourt Brace & Company, 1936,
copyright T. S. Eliot, 1963, 1964,
reprinted by permission of the publisher

Excerpts from The Hermit and the Love Thief, translated by
Barbara Stoler Miller, copyright Columbia University Press, 1978,
reprinted with permission of the publisher

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

in order not to fall into the Errors of the ancient Philosophers, who believed that there are no Antipodes.

FATHER ALONSO DE OVALLE ,
Diccionario de Autoridades

In 1951 I was living in Paris. I had a modest job at the Mexican Embassy, having arrived six years earlier, in December 1945. The mediocrity of my position perhaps explains why, after two or three years, I had not been transferred to another post, as is the diplomatic custom. My superiors had forgotten me, and I secretly thanked them. I was trying to write and, most of all, I was exploring the city that is probably the most beautiful example of the genius of our civilization: solid without heaviness, huge without gigantism, tied to the earth but with a desire for flight. A city where moderation rules the excesses of both the body and the head with the same gentle and unyielding authority. In its most auspicious momentsa square, an avenue, a group of buildingstension turns to harmony, a pleasure for the eyes and for the mind. Exploration and recognition: in my walks and rambles I discovered new places and neighborhoods, but there were others that I recognized, not by sight but from novels and poems. Paris for me is a city that, more than invented, is reconstructed by memory and the imagination. I saw a few friends, French and foreign, sometimes in their apartments, but usually in the cafs and bars. In Paris, as in other Latin cities, one lives more in the streets than at home. I met with friends with whom I shared artistic and intellectual affinities, and was immersed in the literary life of those days, with its clamorous philosophical and political debates. But my secret obsession was poetry: to write it, think it, live it. Excited by so many contradictory thoughts, feelings, and emotions, I was living each moment so intensely that it never occurred to me that this way of life would ever change. The futurethat is, the unexpectedhad almost completely evaporated.

One day the Ambassador called me to his office and, without saying a word, handed me a cable: I had been transferred. The news was bewildering and painful. It was normal that I should be sent elsewhere, but I was devastated to leave Paris. The reason for my transfer was that the government of Mexico had formally established relations with India, which had gained its independence in 1947, and now was planning to open a mission in Delhi. Knowing that I was being sent to India consoled me a little: rituals, temples, cities whose names evoked strange tales, motley and multicolored crowds, women with feline grace and dark and shining eyes, saints, beggars. That same morning I learned that the person who had been named ambassador was Emilio Portes Gil, a well-known and influential man who had once been the President of Mexico. Besides the Ambassador, the staff would consist of a consul, an under-secretary (myself), and two counselors.

Why had they chosen me? No one told me, and I never would learn the reason. But there were rumors that my transfer had come at the suggestion of the poet Jaime Torres Bodet, then Director General of UNESCO, to Manuel Tello, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. It seemed that Torres Bodet was disturbed by some of my literary activities, and had been particularly displeased by my participation, with Albert Camus and Mara Casares, in an event commemorating the anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (July 18, 1936), and organized by a group that was close to the Spanish anarchists. Although the Mexican government did not have relations with Francoquite the opposite: it was the only country in the world that had an official ambassador to the Spanish Republic in ExileTorres Bodet thought that my presence at that political-cultural gathering, and some of the things I said there, were improper. I will never know if this story is true, but years later, at a dinner, I heard Torres Bodet make a curious confession. Talking about writers who had served in the diplomatic corpsAlfonso Reyes and Jos Gorostiza in Mexico, Paul Claudel and Saint-John Perse in France, among othershe added, But one must avoid, at all costs, having two writers in the same embassy.

I said good-bye to my friends. Henri Michaux gave me a little anthology of poems by Kabr, Krishna Riboud a print of the goddess Durga, and Kostas Papaioannou a copy of the Bhagavad-Gt, which became my spiritual guide to the world of India. In the middle of my preparations, I received a letter from Mexico with instructions from the new Ambassador: I was to meet him in Cairo. With the rest of the staff, we would continue on to Port Said, where we would board a Polish ship, the