Mark Strand and Octavio Paz: The Universality of Poetry, or a Friendship in Translation

Abstract

This essay explores aesthetic and intellectual affinities between the rhyming sensibilities of poet-translators Mark Strand and Octavio Paz—close friends who admired each other deeply and translated each other’s poems as monuments to their respective work and friendship. The two became friends in the late 1960s, while preparing the anthology New Poetry of Mexico (1970). They spent time together, corresponded, and discussed poetry and politics. Paz admired the transparent verbal perfection of Strand’s poetry. Strand admired Paz’s generosity, intelligence, and steadfast poetic vocation. Both shared not only a nomadic existence, but also conceptions of poetry and translation. This essay’s four movements include a bio-bibliographical note on Strand and Paz highlighting the striking symmetries between their lives, discussion of their work as poet-translators and the fundamental tenets of their theory on translation, Strand’s translation of Paz’s poems and Paz’s translation of Strand’s into their respective mother tongues, and elucidation of the reasons for their choice of these poems. Ultimately, the poets’ biographical and aesthetic similarities and their work as poet-translators testify to the universality of poetry—to a single vast poem and endless work in progress to which they contributed with the oeuvre of a lifetime.