A Study Guide (New Edition) for Octavio Paz's "Duration"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide (New Edition) for Octavio Paz's "Duration", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781535867870

Book preview

17

Duration

Octavio Paz

1962

Introduction

The Nobel Prize–winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz's Duración, translated as Duration, is a surreal account of the speaker's waking up to the beginnings of a thunderstorm with a heightened sensual awareness, which carries over to his relations with the person he is addressing. A giant of Latin American and Spanish-language literature, Paz was prolific in writing both essays—covering poetics, aesthetics, politics, and many other subjects— and verse, the latter collected in over twenty volumes spanning more than fifty years. His own poetics evolved over the course of his career until he settled into a steady surrealism that often leaves particulars obscure but communicates a devotion to personal liberation and self-fulfillment through expression and momentary experience.

The poem signals Paz's absorption, in the course of his worldwide travels, in Eastern philosophy and spirituality. The epigraph is from the I Ching, or Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese text that can be used to help one find direction regarding important choices in life. The epigraph suggests a thunderstorm, the duration of which the poem perhaps spans, although the language allows for little certainty with regard to what takes place. What is clear is that the speaker sees in the addressee a consummate connection with the natural world, which reveals itself in the pair's interactions and especially their nature-inflected communication.

The poem was written in 1959 or 1960 and first collected in Spanish in 1962 in Paz's Salamandra (Salamander). The poem was subsequently translated for volumes including the bilingual Configurations (1971)—which omits the epigraph—Selected Poems (1984), and The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987 (1987).

Author Biography

Paz was born on March 31, 1914, in Mixcoac, part of the federal district of Mexico City, to a pious mother born to Spanish immigrants and a freethinking father whose vocation as a journalist and lawyer entailed supporting and defending the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) was ongoing during Paz's youth, but he was sheltered from the violence and its complications. He was raised in relative solitude in a run-down mansion and educated at a French religious school, his aunt having tutored him in the language. His grandfather's library spurred Paz's lifelong self-learning by allowing