Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot

Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence

Tom Boll

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351193931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"When the sixteen-year-old Octavio Paz (1914-1998) discovered The Waste Land in Spanish translation, it 'opened the doors of modern poetry'. The influence of T S Eliot would accompany Paz throughout his career, defining many of his key poems and pronouncements. Yet Paz's attitude towards his precursor was ambivalent. Boll's study is the first to trace the history of Paz's engagement with Eliot in Latin American and Spanish periodicals of the 1930s and 40s. It reveals the fault lines that run through the work of the dominant figure in recent Mexican letters. By positioning Eliot in a Latin American context, it also offers new perspectives on one of the capital figures of Anglo-American modernism."

Introduction

In 1988, as he came to the end of his career, Octavio Paz was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize. His acceptance speech to the Ingersoll Foundation in Chicago wasted little time over the formalities — acknowledging the worth of previous recipients, Borges, Ionesco, Naipaul — before striking a more confessional tone:

La circunstancia de que el Premio ostente el nombre del poeta angloamericano tiene para mí un alcance primordial, a un tiempo íntimo y simbólico. Es algo más que un premio: es una contraseña, un signo de pase. Era un adolescente cuando lo leí por primera vez y esa lectura me abrió las puertas de la poesía moderna.¹

[The fact that this prize bears the Anglo-American poet’s name has a special significance for me, at once intimate and symbolic. It is something more than a prize: it is a secret sign, a password. I was a teenager when I read Eliot for the first time and that reading opened the doors of modern poetry for me.]

That teenage discovery was made in the Mexican periodical Contemporáneos [Contemporaries], which in 1930 published one of the first Spanish translations of The Waste Land — a prose version by Enrique Munguía Jr., titled ‘El páramo’.² Paz describes the encounter in terms of ritual — ‘un alcance primordial, a un tiempo íntimo y simbólico’ — with the prize now ‘una contraseña’ or ‘un signo de pase’: an initiation rite the other side of which was not adulthood so much as the world of modern poetry. Eliot is closely bound to Paz’s sense of both poetic self and historical moment. Yet just as initiation rites are traumatic events, Paz registers ambivalence. He recalls that as well as ‘curiosidad’ [curiosity] and ‘seducción’ [seduction], he experienced ‘azoro’ [shock] (OC2, 290); and in a separate article on Enrique Munguía, which he published alongside the acceptance speech in Vuelta, Paz confesses that ‘Eliot contradecía todo lo que yo pensaba que era moderno y todo lo que yo creía que era poético’ [Eliot contradicted everything that I thought was modern and everything that I thought was poetic].³ Eliot did not fit straightforwardly into the world inhabited by the young Mexican poet, in spite of his clear impact, and Paz is open about the anxiety this generated. He talks about ‘daring’ eventually to read Eliot in English: ‘finalmente, cuando progresé en el aprendizaje del inglés, me atreví a leerlo en su idioma original’ [eventually, when I made progress with my English, I dared to read him in the original] (OC2, 290). That reading probably occurred around 1943, when he was living in the United States, a period that ushered in a fresh engagement with Eliot’s work. Yet Paz also expresses determined resistance to certain aspects of his forerunner: ‘Mi fascinación ante The Waste Land nunca me hizo cerrar los ojos ante la incompatibilidad entre mis convicciones y las ideas y esperanzas que inspiran a ese poema’ [My fascination with The Waste Land never blinded me to the incompatibility of my convictions and the ideas and hopes that inspire that poem] (OC2, 293). Paz recalls his first reading of Eliot as decisive, yet nevertheless contradictory: both seduction and shock, promise and fear, acceptance and resistance. This rite of passage was no graceful admission to the world of modern poetry, and its fault lines run throughout Paz’s ensuing career.

Theories of Literary Relation

Yet how can one most productively approach and narrate this literary relation? How can one account for both the enthusiasm and the ambivalence that Paz expressed in his speech to the Ingersoll Foundation? In the decades since Paz first read Eliot, various theories have appeared which attempt to account for the ways that authors relate to each other in terms of influence, intertextuality and reception. I propose in this introduction to consider how far these different approaches can be applied to the case of Paz and Eliot.

The most notorious theorist of the hostilities and contradictions bred by literary influence is Harold Bloom. His first theoretical study, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), has itself been read as heir to a slightly earlier work by Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1971). Bate talks of ‘an accumulating anxiety’ of influence which, like Bloom, he views as a psychological phenomenon that becomes particularly acute towards the end of the eighteenth century.⁴ Their awareness of anxiety is promising for an exploration of the trepidation that is evident in Paz’s account of his initial response to Eliot. Their psychological approach also seems appropriate given the rhetoric of ritual — the physical enactment of a psychic event — that Paz employs. In spite of the resemblances, however, Bloom and Bate are driven by different preoccupations. Although Bate sees intimidation from earlier writers as a perennial worry, he is most interested in the historical progression from neoclassical theory of the eighteenth century to the romantic period, when an anxiety of influence presses with new urgency. He describes a considerable latitude in eighteenth-century concepts of imitation, and traces the process by which they gradually succumb to the burden imposed by a new exaltation of originality. Although Bloom agrees, in The Anxiety of Influence, that the modern poet ‘is the inheritor of a melancholy engendered in the mind of the Enlightenment’, he has little patience for gradual historical process, and finds an individual, Descartes, on whom to blame the poet’s anxiety.⁵ Once Descartes had separated mind as intensiveness from the world as extensiveness, poets could no longer be influenced by the stars, the outer world from which they were now isolated: ‘Instead of the radiation of an aetherial fluid we received the poetic flowing in of an occult power exercised by humans, rather than by stars upon humans’ (p. 39). We must now seek influence from other minds, other poets, breeding an anxiety of competition. This shift of emphasis goes some way to close Bate’s historical perspective, opening another. It allows Bloom to escape the restrictions of Bate’s process, in which various conceptions of imitation and influence change their configuration over time, to a more clearly grasped moment when an individual in possession of a single idea changes everything, cataclysmically. While the reference to Descartes does imply some concern for a historical succession of ideas, Bloom’s rhetoric drives away from historical process to a mythical, atemporal fall from grace. In fact when, in a later preface to his book, Bloom rejects Bate’s choice of the late eighteenth century as an identifiable period for the birth of anxiety (p. xxiv), the revision does very little to damage his theory, implying that history didn’t contribute that much to it in the first place.

There is also considerable divergence in the psychological approach of the two books. For Bate, we suffer from a taboo on boldly facing up to what we admire and desire to imitate: ‘To reduce that taboo to size, to get ourselves out of this self-created prison, to heal or overcome this needless self-division, has been the greatest single problem for modern art.’⁶ This is a psychological problem that can be redeemed; it is even ‘needless’. Bloom, for whom Freud’s psychology ‘is not severe enough’ (p. 9), will allow no such optimism. The awful presence of what we admire, the precursor poet, and the anxiety generated by this presence, cannot be escaped: ‘A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety’ (p. 94). Where Bate’s psychology is, for an aspiring poet, a malleable orientation towards the past, Bloom’s is an unnegotiable given. Such an uncompromising view of the psychology at work provides Bloom with a clearly delineated premise: ‘creative interpretation’ is ‘necessarily a misinterpretation’ (p. 43). He is consequently able to elaborate a much more thorough taxonomy of the influence relation — his six revisionary ratios of clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades — than Bate can provide. Bloom is, then, a more cursory historian than Bate but, on the face of it at least, a more systematic psychologist.

Bloom’s revisionary ratios have been attractive to critics who wish to impose some order on an area of literary studies that commonly owes more to conjecture than to science. Paz’s objection, which I cited earlier, to the ‘ideas y esperanzas’ [ideas and hopes] that inspired The Waste Land could be explained as both clinamen, a misreading of Eliot, and tessera, an explicative completion of a lacuna in the precursor’s vision. To follow Bloom thus, however, one must make a large assumption about the way that Paz generates his work out of the relationship with Eliot. The Bloomian reading is predicated on a belief that any difference between the two poets is by necessity evidence of Paz’s evasion, or wilful misinterpretation, of his precursor rather than an allegiance to the practice of other writers. Paz’s ‘convicciones’ [convictions] react against Eliot rather than conforming to more immediate influences who were active in 1930s Mexico. Critics commonly get round the limitations of this assumption by employing Bloom’s terminology without pressing too hard the theory of evasion that underpins it. This practice excuses Bloom’s theory the rigour of close examination but also does his theoretical ambition, which is considerable, a disservice. He declares at the outset that his book offers not merely a theory of influence but ‘a theory of poetry by way of a description of poetic influence’ (p. 8). He does not intend the ratios to stand alone, and one cannot apply them without also considering the project of which they are a part.

That project is a revision of ‘“humane letters”’ (p. 86), a ‘newer and starker way of reading poems’ (p. 58). Bloom aims ‘to de-idealize our accepted notions of how one poet helps to form another’ (p. 5). The idea of creative collaboration between poets, the dignity of literary tradition is a sham:

The main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.

(p. 30)

A reader hoping to grasp the theory may feel disoriented by a rhetoric that can jump so readily from awe at ‘the terrible splendor of cultural heritage’ (p. 32) to contempt for ‘the squalor of our timeless human fear of mortality’ (p. 58). The impulse is doubtless prophetic, but the effect of Bloom’s style is more often one of rumbustiousness: from the bluster of ‘various fiercenesses’ (p. 33), ‘enormous curtailment’ (p. 125) and ‘fearful strength’ (p. 131...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index