Octavio Paz in India: Letters to Jean-Clarence Lambert

Abstract

This article analyzes some aspects of the life and work of Octavio Paz in India, through the letters he wrote to his friend, the French translator and poet, Jean-Clarence Lambert. Much has been written about this fundamental stage in the life and work of Octavio Paz, during the years of his service as Ambassador to India, Ceylon (currently Sri Lanka) and Afghanistan, but the difference is that in this article we are going to stop and reflect on the beginning of that transformative journey that includes a personal crisis of the author, Nobel Prize winner in Literature (1990), until the much needed encounter with his French “muse”, the plastic artist Marie-José Tramini, after the divorce and the stormy relationship with the Mexican intellectual and novelist Elena Garro. All of this is deeply connected to the discovery and falling in love with a culture as rich and complex as that of
the Hindustani subcontinent. In this article it will be very clear that for the consolidation of Paz’s critical and artistic work it was essential to find that emotional and loving stability that comes with Marie-José. I argue that much of the quality of Paz’s production would be unthinkable without that loving relationship. Thus, in this article we will trace some essential and even unknown aspects of the life of the author of Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and which are confided with great honesty and transparency by a subjectivity as sensitive as that of the Mexican poet and intellectual.