Octavio Paz was one of the most recognized Mexican intellectuals and writers in the world. He was a poet, essayist, writer and diplomat, and is one of the most prestigious authors of the second half of the 20th century, which achieved international recognition.
Paz's work, especially poems, essays and translations, has been translated into more than 32 languages, in addition to English, French, Italian, and into languages such as Chinese, Ukrainian and Japanese.
Octavio Paz's career, who was the only Mexican to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, began in 1931, with his first poetic work published, called Sea of Day. However, it was with the essay The Labyrinth of Solitude, with which his work began to attract attention worldwide.
In the lyrical field, Paz formed the group of great poets together with Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, who after the decline of modernism, led the renewal of Latin American lyric in the twentieth century.
He was the grandson of Irineo Paz, a novelist and army soldier and son of Octavio Paz Solórzano, a lawyer who supported the cause of revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. He studied at the Faculties of Law and Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he took classes with Carlos Pellicer, who linked him to poets such as Jorge Cuesta, Xavier Villaurrutia, Salvador Novo and José Gorostiza.
“They opened my eyes and discovered modern poetry,” Paz said, although Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez were also his first influences on lyric.
His social concerns were soon felt, and in 1937 he made a trip to Yucatan with the intention of creating a school for the children of workers. In June of that year he married fellow writer Elena Garro, with whom he had a daughter named Helena. He later traveled to Spain to participate in the Congress of Antifascist Writers, where he met Rafael Alberti, Nicolás Guillén, Pablo Neruda and Ernest Hemingway.
Upon his return, he participated in the magazine Taller in 1938 and later began a life of travel, as in 1943 he received the Guggehnheim Scholarship and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, United States.
Among other outstanding things he did, are that in 1945 he began his work in the Mexican Foreign Service, in the embassies of France, India and Japan. He also taught at various American and European universities, gave lectures and founded the magazines Plural and Vuelta in the 1960s.
As an intellectual he was at the center of the controversy, since as a young man he communed with liberalism and Marxism, doctrines that he would later criticize. His denunciation of human rights violations in socialist countries caused him severe questions on the part of the Latin American left.
In addition, throughout his life, he won several prizes for his publications, the most important being the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1990, for The Labyrinth of Solitude.
The famous Mexican writer died on a day like today, April 19, but in 1998, because of bone cancer.
Bone cancer can start in any bone in the body, but most often it affects the pelvis or large bones in the arms and legs. This type of cancer is rare, accounting for less than 1% of all types of cancer. In fact, noncancerous bone tumors are much more common than cancerous ones.
Some types of bone cancer occur mostly in children, while others mainly affect adults. Surgical removal is the most common treatment, although chemotherapy and radiation therapy may also be used.
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