Viento entero
First edition.
Unique self-published edition on a private press in Delhi, of 197 copies, all signed (no. 42).
They are printed on rag paper from a small town on the outskirts of Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, known for its handmade paper: Sanganer.
Presentation copy, inscribed: “To Max-Pol Fouchet, amistad y poesie, una misma Fuente, una misma agua clara. Octavio Paz”.
Parfait état.
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
Very fine provenance: it was in Fontaine that Paz’s first two texts were published, in issue no. 57, December 1946: two poems, ″Sueño de Eva″ and ″Cuarto de hotel″, in bilingual version, with a translation by… Max-Pol Fouchet.
This rare publication was self-published, on the spot, in August 1965, on his return from a stay in Afghanistan. By then, Paz was already an established writer – self-publishing was rare for him, and he would have encountered no editorial obstacles in getting his work published by his usual publisher. So why the urgency, with Octavio Paz rushing to publish the poem himself in Delhi and immediately sending it to his friends? The answer lies in one name: Marie Jo. His meeting the previous year, “between rue Montalambert and rue du Bac”, with Marie-José Tramini instantly changed his poetry and his whole life. He married her the following year; she followed him to Delhi, then Kabul, where he composed Viento entero.
It was this poem that was chosen in March 2014 by Mexico’s Ministry of Culture to celebrate the centenary of the birth of their first Nobel Prize winner for literature; a fundamental poem in his work, closely linked to Paz’s life and his renewal in love thanks to his relationship with Marie José. The couple, who would never leave each other until Paz’s death in the spring of 1998, stayed in New Delhi until 1967. It was there that Paz heard the news of the Tlatelolco massacre, which put an end to the social movement that had been agitating Mexico City since October. Disgusted by this crushing, which was followed by the hypocritical Olympic Games, the poet ambassador resigned his post and disavowed the oppressive government of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz.
In a note, Paz declares that “the poem is a succession of landscapes, situations and moments – in the manner of a Japanese ‘renga’ (succession of haikus) (…) [which] allude to an actual journey to northern India and Afghanistan. Each stanza is a situation or a moment of this journey (…); Viento entero completely represents my state of mind (…), what I think, believe and want”, Octavio Paz wrote to French poet and translator Jean-Clarence Lambert on April 5, 1967.
