Flame, speech

Flame, speech

 I read in a poem: 

 to talk is divine.

 But the gods don’t speak:

 they make and unmake worlds

 while men do the talking. 

 They play frightening games

 without words.

 The spirit descends,

 loosening tongues,

 but doesn’t speak words:

 it speaks fire.

 Lit by a god,

 language becomes

 a prophesy

 of flames and a tower

 of smoke and collapse

 of syllables burned:

 ash without meaning.

 The word of man

 is the daughter of death.

 We talk because we are mortal:

 words are not signs, they are years. 

 Saying what they say,

 the words we are saying

 say time: they name us.

 We are time’s names. 

 To talk is human.

 --Octavio Paz 

translated by Mark Strand

 

Octavio Paz was at times a diplomat and a teacher but above all he was a person of literature, with a stature and breadth not seen much anymore. In his lifetime—1914 to 1998--Octavio Paz lived, went to school and worked in his native Mexico, in California, New York and Paris. His many volumes of poetry, several plays and his many essays reflect the crosscurrents of cultures he experienced and studied, providing him with the language to explore and express their characteristics. However erudite and international were his tastes and knowledge, he wrote mostly if not exclusively in Spanish.

 I discovered him through his essays when his collection Alternating Currents was first published in the U.S. in 1972, and over the years I collected nine of his non-fiction volumes. Some of his interests and topics—surrealism, Native peoples of the Americas, Buddhism, contemporary film, literature in general—were shared interests, but I was equally engaged by his exploration of Mexican culture and history, about which I knew little. I was sympathetic to and excited by his approach—philosophical and poetic but grounded in the physical and place— expressed in dazzling language.

 His fame as a poet rests with his longer poems, but his major concerns also appear in shorter poems like this one—especially time and humanity.  Reading this poem at this particular moment, the unfathomable fire and cruelty of war in Ukraine and our human helplessness are brought quickly to mind.  Yet there are stories of impromptu concerts in basements and bomb shelters, and there is the solace of human talk.  

Paz was reputed to be quite a talker himself, which is evident from filmed interviews. That's him talking in the top photo.  Octavio Paz was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.