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Ruptures and Convergences
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13570 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1988 |
4,259 Words |
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Dolores Moyano Martin
Dolores Moyano Martin is a Washington-based writer who
specializes in Latin American affairs. |
CONVERGENCES
Essays on Art and Literature
Octavio Paz
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987
320 pp., $19.95
This collection of essays once again confirms that in addition to being the greatest living poet in the Spanish language, Octavio Paz is one of the most brilliant and original essayists in any language. Indeed, his interests and sensibility transcend any one language or culture. Paz reminds one, as did Borges, of those cosmopolitan, omnivorous intellectuals of the Middle Ages: the Arab Averroes, the Frenchman Abelard, the Jew Maimonides.
These essays, splendidly translated by Helen Lane, communicate that vanishing sense of learning as enchantment--the state we recognize in the complete absorption of the child, the artist, and the genius, for whom work is a form of play, and knowledge a miracle of the imagination. Paz leads us into each new theme as if into a great wilderness, his wide-ranging erudition anticipating the alien landscape, his imagination a guiding light that reveals the most unexpected connections, a road here, a fork there, and over what we thought was an unsurmountable abyss, a bridge that leads to the breathtaking landscape of a new understanding.
Art of Rupture and Art of Convergences
The title of the collection, Convergences, is an allusion to a theme that runs through the essays: "While the art of the immediate past had
... (1994 of 26226 Characters)
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