There are some books that take me a long time to read because they deflect me onto other things. Reading Paz's 'The Labyrinth of Solitude' has got me interested in Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, on whom Paz was an authority, and I'm currently reading her works in the Penguin edition translated by Margeret Sayers Peden. Sor Juana was a sixteenth century Mexican nun - a most unlikely candidate for major poet, playwright, dazzling intellectual and proto-feminist, although she was all of these things. She turned her nun's cell into a sort of literary salon and amassed a huge library, and a collection of musical instruments and scientific equipment. Mexico, of course, didn't exist as such, but was part of New Spain, and in the grip of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Sor Juana's recantation of her intellectual activities signed in her own blood soon before she died seems almost too dramatic to be true, but it is true. In an ideal and leisure-rich world I'd tackle Paz's monumental biography and study of Sor Juana. In the meantime I need to finish 'The Labyrinth of Solitude', unless it sends me off to somewhere else...

Reading during my travels: Edward Gibbon and Octavio Paz. 'The Decline and Fall...' was recommended to me by John Bloomberg-Rissman, so I picked up the Penguin 'Great Ideas' series; Gibbon on Christianity. Pretty radical stuff. His description of the Messianic nature of early Christianity is strikingly reminiscent of certain areas of the USA today where congregations are waiting eagerly for the end of the world. John told me not to skip the footnotes, and he was right. Discussing how the early Christians regarded it their duty to oppose the idolatry of paganism (whose gods they believed were fallen angels in disguise), Gibbon adds a footnote:

"Even the reverses of Greek and Roman coins were of an idolatrous nature. Here indeed the scruples of the Christian were suspended by a stronger passion."

'The Labyrinth of Solitude' has been on my to-do list for a long time. I knew very little about Mexican history when I started it, and I couldn't have had a better introduction. It's about, for want of a better description, the nation's psyche, and consists of nine essays. In some sections there are acute insights on almost every page. In the first essay he discusses the Pachucos, the Mexican teenage gangs that emerged in southern California, and his observations could be applied to similar phenomena in the UK today; this from a book published in 1959 - well before youth culture was regarded as worthy of serious study. Here's a taste of the book - Paz discussing the relationship of art to history:

"I am not attempting to justify colonial society. In the strictest sense, no society can be justified while one or another form of oppression subsists within it. I want to understand it as a living, and therefore contradictory, whole. In the same way, I refuse to see the human sacrifices of the Aztecs as an isolated expression of cruelty without relation to the rest of that civilization. Their tearing out of hearts and their monumental pyramids, their sculpture and their ritual cannibalism, their poetry and their 'war of flowers', their theocracy and their great myths, are all an indissolube one. To deny this would be as infantile as to deny Provencal poetry in the name of the medieval serfs, or Aeschylus because there were slaves in Athens. History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists of transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality - if only for an instant - by means of creation."

(tr. Lysander Kemp).

Poetic Heroes, Series 1: Octavio Paz

I've been reading Paz's poetry for several years after I bought his Collected (pub. Caracent) with the fee from judging a local poetry competition. I also acquired his early work in a New Directions edition from the US. It's now become a life-companion. I don't read Spanish (that didn't stop me producing a version of one of his poems), but I know enough to get the pronunciation and rhythm of the original, and the translations are top-notch, the main man being Eliot Weinberger, but there's Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Tomlinson, Muriel Rukeyser, W.C. Williams, Paul Blackburn - an impressive roll-call. I won't attempt to summarize the work of one the the 20th century's great writers. Suffice to say that the range of his intellectual concerns is vast, and, of course, he managed to turn those concerns into poetry. One example is his work on Indian culture (he was Mexican ambassador to India for several years). Before the Beatles met the Maharishi, Paz had conducted rather more in-depth studies (for example, he organized, the first exhibition of Tantric Art held in the West), and the Chilean artist-poet Cecilia Vicuña has spoken of Paz as a guru for herself and other Latin American poets during this period. I've read his essays on the erotic, 'The Double Flame', and planned reading for the summer is his classic book on Mexican culture, 'The Labyrinth of Solitude'. Paz's poetry spans a huge range of forms, from the wilder shores of surrealism to discursive sonnets to visual poetry. I recently tackled his long poem 'Pasado En Claro/A Draft of Shadows':

Are there messengers? Yes,
space is a body tattooed with signs, the air
an invisible web of calls and answers.
Animals and things make languages,
through us the universe talks with itself.
We are a fragment -
accomplished in our unaccomplishment -
of its discourse. A coherent and empty solipsism...

(tr. Eliot Weinberger)