West Turns East at the End of History

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, Octavio Paz was Latin America's great poet, essayist and critic whose most enduring work was The Labyrinth of Solitude . We would often meet in the late afternoon over scotch on ice at his apartment on Reforma in Mexico City, the warm afternoon rain pounding against the windows of his book-lined study, gazing out toward the Angel of Independence column in the center of that daunting megalopolis.
Over the years, we collaborated on several issues of Vuelta , a small but influential journal like NPQ . Paz believed that "the most important things can be said at the margins beyond the entertainment and commercial imperatives of the mass media."
Though petty literary politics sometimes intruded, Paz was a truly magnanimous soul whose entire life was an exploration. Everything interested him, from Surrealism to the Indian caste system (he was the Mexican ambassador to India before resigning in 1968 to protest the student massacre at Tlatelolco). He liked to quote Baudelaire, saying that poets were universal translators because they translate the language of the universe—stars, water, trees—into the language of man.
Paz died in 1998. We held this conversation in 1992. It also appeared in Vuelta as "La Transformacion del Tiempo: El Encuentro de Oriente y Occidente."