Many years after Shadows of Works confirmed Octavio Paz not merely as a poet and essayist, but as an essential literary critic of the 20th-century Spanish-speaking world, a re-reading reveals a meddlesome relevance.
The compilation includes in its three parts (“Poetry and History,” “Shadows of Works,” and “The Return of the Days”) sufficient texts to ratify his exegetical generosity toward dissimilar works and authors; a stance against the sectarian rot of “leftists,” as well as the swampy envy of certain compatriots and contemporaries.
I will comment here on a few lessons because they are meant for right now, as 2026 begins. The same sharp insights of intelligence he exhibited when characterizing the identities of his Mexico in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) appear in the best texts of literary criticism he grouped seven years before receiving the Nobel Prize in 1990. I will argue based briefly on two texts: “Reading and Contemplation” and “Poetry and History (Laurel and Us).”
The brilliant author of The Bow and the Lyre —one of the most motivating reflections by a Hispanic author on the writing of a poem— warns that “naming and classifying are not equivalent to explaining, and even less to understanding.” Under this premise, which many ignore, he provokes us with his perspectives on the reading of poems, which “is not communication but communion.”
He affirms that “the poem is the metaphor for what the poet felt and thought. That metaphor is the resurrection of experience and its transmutation. The reading of the poem reproduces this double movement of change and resurrection.” This forces a distinction between reading poems and reading influencers or news bulletins, or even other literary genres such as the novel or biography. He insists on what might seem obvious, were it not for the unfortunate fact that some readers do not draw the line. They commit the same error seen in many visits to art galleries: one cannot stand in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) before Les Demoiselles d’Avignon —the canvas with which Picasso initiated Cubism in 1907— for the same amount of time and with the same gaze as before so many pretentious bluffs under labels of conceptualist, immersive, or digital visual art.
Next, the poet of Libertad bajo palabra exalts the delicate and complex labor of the translator. Although today Artificial Intelligence programs facilitate the arduous task —merely the draft— of choosing which word best respects the original or which syntax nears the author’s, the truth is that the translator of literary texts is not excluded, especially when they are a talented writer who stamps their version with a deviation of singular relief. When I read the translation of Fernando Pessoa’s poems done by Octavio Paz for UNAM, I know that I am simultaneously reading Octavio Paz, which brings me a formidable joy.
We still wait —for example— for new Eliseo Diegos to translate William Blake, Fina García Marruz (privately) to translate Paul Claudel, Virgilio Piñera to translate Proust, Cintio Vitier to translate Rimbaud, Lezama Lima to translate Saint‑John Perse, or Gastón Baquero to translate Valéry; to cite only the Cuban poets of Orígenes. This, by the way —forgive the digression— reminds us that the art of translation always accompanied them, qualified their lives, and their love for the word.
In these pages on translation, his reference to Herder —recreated by André Breton— is delightful; he considered that each language was, more than a system of signs, a historical physiognomy, by which he meant —Paz clarifies— “that language is a destiny, a way not only of speaking but of being.”
The thought of Benjamin Lee Whorf —his linguistic philosophy— is summarized and commented upon through a sagacious analogy with modern physics, after which Paz praises Whorf’s extraordinary insight in stating that each language was “a point of view,” entering a polemic that reaches us today. The recitation of a poem to Tara, recreated in a tale in 18th-century Tibet that concludes the essay, reaffirms the strong hypothesis that languages are always appreciative angles of realities.
“Poetry and History” is a critical assessment of a legendary Mexican anthology of modern poetry in the Spanish language. Laurel (1941) allows Paz —as always— to launch his literary lifeboats, as well as his darts. The poet of Sunstone and Blanco once again involves himself in meliorative and peyorative judgments about poets and poems, a labor that culminates in Children of the Mire. He reaffirms through facts how he knew how to have the generosity to concern himself with the work of his colleagues, attending with zeal to movements, deviations, and key stylistic channels.
It is a pleasure to re-read his words on Pablo Neruda: “Stalinism has not been the cause but one of the forms adopted by the sickness of our century: paranoia, the delirium of persecution”; a sickness that is worth extending, under other repressive fanaticisms, to this first quarter of the 21st century. It is also a pleasure when he mocks the theory of generations —so popular then— and rightly doubts that they are the protagonists of historical changes. His lucidity urges him not to waver before the certainty that “continuity triumphs at the expense of rupture. At the expense, also, of the true history of our poetry.”
Is it true —as he maintains and invites us to dialogue— that Eliot and Pound let history in, while it was expelled by Valéry and Juan Ramón Jiménez? Is there a rift between Rubén Darío and César Vallejo that makes them unique while being protagonists of a break in the poetry of our language? Do we owe to “pure poetry” —from Jiménez to Jorge Guillén— some of the most beautiful poems of the 20th century, but also a cloud over poetic reality? Can it be accepted —as Luis Cernuda does in his poem “The Lighthouse Keeper”— that “the contemporary poet is a man among men and his solitude is the promiscuous solitude of one who walks lost in the crowd”? Is it worth believing that the prose of the city is our poetry of today, because modern life turns the private public, a phenomenon that extends, widens, and floods?
These and many other questions are what Octavio Paz launches in his “re-turn” to Laurel. He concludes by announcing the end of Modernity, a reality that today is more palpable than ever. That vision of infinite progress has died. Much more so in the arts and, certainly, in poetry. That vision of time as progress—which indeed nourished thought during the last centuries, at least since the Enlightenment and Romanticism—has been extinguished. After admitting there is no new idea, he says, “not yet.” Hence the question as the decisive sign. Which remains our same question before a poetic panorama so murky for being massive, so plagued by zombies.
The lesson on Laurel —its relevance— also concerns a countless number of literary critics who are “neither here nor there,” who, as the saying goes: “Their elevator doesn’t reach the top floor.” Such “colleagues” disguise themselves with quotes from critics and theorists migrating from linguistics and sociology. They exhibit a shameful ignorance of Octavio Paz —among others— because “he’s past his time.” “Novolatry” prevents them from seeing near and seeing far. They do not even show curiosity to have an idea of their predecessors, to know what they did. Few have glanced at the six volumes of René Wellek’s A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950… But they are up-to-date on the junk. They are junk.
Shadows of Works avoids any “junk-peddling,” also based on another of its lessons, implicit in most of its paragraphs although it seems a self-evident truth: literary criticism is a form of the art of writing. It always demands —certainly from other angles— a prose that honors the Latin challenge of dulce et utile. In a more restricted way, knowledge of the work of Octavio Paz —like that of Jorge Luis Borges, for example— also teaches us this stylistic challenge. A challenge that Artificial Intelligence now dynamizes and multiplies for those of us who resist “copy & paste.” The Shadows of Octavio Paz —of this I am certain— favor us.
