Viento entero
Signed presentation inscription: “à Max-Pol Fouchet, amistad y poesía, una misma fuente, una misma agua clara. Octavio Paz.”
An exceptional provenance: it was in Fontaine that Paz’s first two texts were published — two poems in issue no. 57 of December 1946 (“Sueño de Eva” and “Cuarto de hotel”), in bilingual editions, translated by none other than Max-Pol Fouchet.
This rare publication was privately printed by the author himself, on the spot, in August 1965, on his return from a stay in Afghanistan. Paz was by then an established writer — self-publishing was unusual for him, and he would have had no difficulty publishing with his regular publisher. Why, then, such urgency that Octavio Paz rushed to print the poem himself in Delhi and send it immediately to his friends? The answer lies in a single name: Marie Jo. His meeting the previous year, “between the rue Montalambert and the rue du Bac,” with Marie-José Tramini instantly transformed both his poetry and his entire life. He married her the following year; she followed him to Delhi, then to Kabul, where he composed Viento entero.
This is the poem chosen in March 2014 by Mexico’s Ministry of Culture to celebrate the centenary of the birth of their first Nobel Prize laureate in Literature — a fundamental poem in his body of work, intimately bound to his life and to the renewal of love brought about by his relationship with Marie José. The couple, who would remain together almost without interruption until Paz’s death in the spring of 1998, stayed in New Delhi until 1967. There Paz learned of the Tlatelolco massacre, which brought an end to the social movement that had been agitating Mexico City since October. Disgusted by this crackdown, followed by the hypocrisy of the Olympic Games, the poet-ambassador resigned his post and disavowed the oppressive government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz.
In a note, Paz explained that “the poem is a succession of landscapes, situations and moments — in the manner of a Japanese ‘renga’ (a succession of haikus) […] [which] allude to a real journey through northern India and Afghanistan. Each stanza is a situation or moment of that journey […]; Viento entero fully represents my state of mind […], what I think, believe and want,” Octavio Paz wrote to the French poet and translator Jean-Clarence Lambert on 5 April 1967.