A Tale of Two Gardens.

Octavio Paz was obsessed with India. Although many American and European writers have been fascinated with the subcontinent, none has studied its culture with the intensity and thoroughness of Paz. The Mexican Nobel laureate was an expert, having researched Indian religions, history, politics, philosophy, and literature and written on Buddhism, the caste system, tantric art, and many other aspects of Indian thought. India, in the words of Paz's translator Eliot Weinberger, was "the other to [Paz's] self-described otherness as a Mexican."

A Tale of Two Gardens contains Paz's poems on India written between 1952 and 1995. In 1951 the Mexican government sent Paz to India as a minor functionary in the first diplomatic delegation to the new nation. It was then that the writer began his long love affair with the place that would be a constant in his poetry for forty years. "Mutra," his first Indian poem, was written in 1952 and records his poetic response to the exotic city of Mathura, a great nucleus of civilization in ancient India and today an important center for Krishna worship. The poem describes the beginning of the summer in subcontinental climes. By means of a multitude of impressionistic images--some erotic, some fierce, some exuberant, some cerebral--Paz captures, as he wrote to Alfonso Reyes, the fevers the nascent season "generates on the earth and in the mind."

In 1962 Paz returned to India as ambassador but resigned in 1968 as a protest against his government's massacre of student demonstrators in Mexico City. Ladera Este [East Slope], generally considered one of Paz's finest pieces of work, was written in India during this time. In the first section, the poet stands alone on a balcony, engulfed in silence: "Stillness / in the middle of the night." Delhi is "Two tall syllables / surrounded by insomnia and sand / I say them in a low voice / Nothing moves." But then the vacuum is filled by images--the Lodi gardens, golden lotuses, ficus trees, mountain passes, temples, mausoleums, goddesses. From among them emerges the face of the "other"--strange, elusive, yet consistent: "He invented a face for himself. / Behind it, / he lived died and was reborn / many times... His wrinkles have no face." From everywhere faces appear, faces that encarnate time and timelessness: "A girl and an old woman, skin and bones / carry bundles bigger than these peaks." "A Tale of Two Gardens," which closes the collection, ends with images of the poet's return to Mexico. The two gardens he evokes are that of his childhood in Mixcoac and the one he shared with his wife in India. But gardens, Paz explains at the beginning of the poem "are not places: they spin, they come and go. / Their apparitions open / another space / in space, / another time in time." These are mental landscapes, the poet's projections of the separate but related realities that intermingle in his mind.

In 1994 and 1995, following a serious operation, Paz again turned his attention to India. The result was a book of adaptations of classical Sanskrit short poems called kavya, ten of which appear here and in In Light of India (Harcourt Brace, 1998), a prose memoir. In the kavya Paz evokes exquisite and fleeting erotic images--a young bather emerging from the river, silks slipping off bodies and fluttering in the breeze--or else articulates his thoughts on poetry, time, nature, and beauty. These verses are tiny treasures--delicate, suggestive, and profound.

Many of these translations have appeared in earlier editions by the same publisher. The English versions of the kavya are new, but of the same high quality that readers have come to expect of Eliot Weinberger and the other translators whose work he includes in this collection.

A regular contributor to Americas, Barbara Mujica is also a writer and professor of Latin American literature at Georgetown University.