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“... One afternoon in June 1962 Octavio Paz and I, until then only acquainted through letters, met at the studio of the painter Juan Soriano in Mexico City. From there we went walking down Paseo de la Reforma, and he told me he had just been appointed ambassador to India, Ceylon and Pakistan. He had accepted, reluctantly, because of the scant job opportunities in Mexico ...”

“... Octavio Paz occupies a unique position in the Spanish-speaking world. He is the foremost living poet of the language as well as being one of the most authoritative interpreters of the Hispanic situation, a pensador in the tradition of Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Rodo and Mariategui. Poetry, however, has always been the vital source of his ideas ...”

“... In 1950 André Breton published a prose poem by Octavio Paz in a surrealist anthology. He thought one line in the work was rather weak and asked Paz to remove it. Paz agreed about the line but was a little puzzled by the possibility of such a judgment on Breton’s part ...”

“... important part of the Surrealist campaign. The Renga composed in Paris more than ten years ago by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson has recently been published here. This work, the result of five days’ collaboration in the basement of the Hôtel St Simon on the left Bank, has both oriental and occidental ...”

“... the Zocalo had been disproportionate to the offence. But I can quite understand it. The Mexicans, Octavio Paz once wrote, believe in two things: Our Lady of Guadalupe and the National Lottery. Mexico is a profoundly Christian country, 95 per cent of the population telling the Census-makers that they are Catholics. Yet the Church has no official power or ...”

“... and sensitive gifts embarrassed by a strange sporadic uneasiness. Charles Tomlinson and Octavio Paz collaborated in producing ‘the first Western renga’, a Japanese name for a poem by several poets writing alternating parts. That first experiment was quadrilingual, and Airborn is a bilingual variant ‘in slow motion’: alternating sections ...”

“... loyalty to Castro after the show-trial of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. And Octavio Paz forced many readers to make an awkward distinction between his political views and his writing when, late in life and in the name of order, he became a member of the putrid Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party. ...”

“... hide from it, or to give it much of a metaphysical meaning. A contrast with the West, where, says Octavio Paz, the word ‘death’ burns the lips. On my second visit to Chittagong, I drove past the slum where eight hundred people had died to a place on the beach where dead bodies were still being washed up. The police kept burying them but more kept ...”

“... traditionally Hispanic and Catholic societies, such as Colombia or Mexico, than in the Argentine. Octavio Paz, one of the few exceptions in that his name appeared regularly among the magazine’s contributors, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, have spoken appreciatively of the journal’s importance for themselves and their friends. As regards Sur’s role in ...”

“... as well as in poetics, the study and practice of translation occupies a pivotal place. Ours is, as Octavio Paz has put it, ‘a culture of and in translation’, a world of continuous metamorphic transfers of meaning. This prominence has redirected scholarship to the history of the subject. Noting, with the authority of self-evidence, that from the Roman ...”

“... pigeons on his Mexico City balcony, by random local speculations: ‘I’ll have to go and ask Octavio Paz, who knows absolutely everything, what exactly the cotillon was; perhaps he could dance me a few steps.’ The result is a very funny book, something far from usual in the Spanish-speaking world. Impatient of the formalities and pomposities of ...”

“... mixed up in that, since being a writer has seemed also to entail being a public man: Fuentes and Octavio Paz have both had careers in diplomacy. The subject at the heart of the collection is the recent past of Mexico City (though some stories are set in the provinces): the scene, from the 1930s onwards, of a dynamic, shape-shifting, erotically charged ...”

“... swishing, clanking effect of this long metallic figure shown as if in blurred multiple exposure. Octavio Paz says it looks less like armour than like coachwork or a fuselage. Early critics, quoted by Seigel, said it was like ‘a lot of disused golf clubs and bags’, ‘an assortment of half-made leather saddles’, ‘an elevated railroad stairway in ...”

“... who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style ...”

“... estrangement. Although the notion that Duchamp’s works are autobiographical is not new – Octavio Paz, for one, said that ‘each one of his paintings is a symbolical self-portrait’ – Seigel authoritatively defines a tradition into which the artist’s self-portrayal naturally fits. He discusses an essential question: how, when an inherited ...”