Octavio Paz quit as ambassador to protest a massacre, then won the Nobel
In 1968 Mexico's ambassador to India resigned after his government's forces killed student protesters at Tlatelolco. The diplomat was Octavio Paz, a poet who had already written a famous essay on the Mexican soul. Twenty-two years later he became the first Mexican to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Paz was born near Mexico City in 1914 into a prominent liberal family. His grandfather Ireneo, a veteran and newspaper publisher, raised him amid a library of Mexican and European classics while his father was away supporting Emiliano Zapata in the revolution. Blue-eyed, he was often taken for a foreigner by other children and later recalled feeling Mexican while others refused to let him be one. He published his first poems in 1931 and a collection, Wild Moon, at nineteen.
The Spanish Civil War shaped him. In July 1937 he attended an international writers' congress in Spain alongside Hemingway, Malraux and Neruda, backing the Republic, and in Paris he encountered the surrealists, who left a lasting mark. Later, the murder of a friend by Stalin's secret police turned him into a sharp critic of totalitarianism, and his magazines Plural and Vuelta exposed abuses in Communist states including Cuba. That stance earned him fierce enemies on the Latin American left, though he always called himself a man of the democratic left, and he criticised Mexico's ruling party as well.
His diplomatic career carried him to New York, Paris, Tokyo, Geneva and finally New Delhi, where he served as ambassador from 1962 and influenced the Bengali poets of the Hungry Generation. In Paris in 1945 he wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude, portraying Mexicans as hiding behind masks of solitude and ceremony, their identity caught between pre-Columbian and Spanish inheritances. The essay deeply influenced writers such as Carlos Fuentes, with whom he later fell out over the Sandinistas.
His long poem Sunstone, written in 1957, was praised at his Nobel ceremony as a magnificent example of surrealist verse. Translators of his poetry into English included Samuel Beckett and Elizabeth Bishop. He also wrote about painters from Miró to Duchamp and produced a major study of the 17th-century nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. He died of cancer in Mexico City on April 19, 1998.
Source: Octavio Paz
