Octavio Paz.

Octavio Paz Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey, translated by Jason Wilson. Harcourt Brace, 128 pages, $22

How would the reading public react if a beloved, widely read American author--a poetic commentator on art, love, and history, with a world reputation and a Nobel Prize--were to publish a long apologetical essay ascribing virtually all of his creative inspiration to the successful struggle of the free world against Communism?

It is hard to imagine so versatile a writer in America today. But even if our culture boasted such a figure, it is even more difficult to conceive of such an essay being greeted with anything but howls of outrage. That is if it were even to see print. After all, some politically incorrect writings of Saul Bellow, a Nobel laureate, resulted in nothing less than an op-ed by a New York Times reporter expressing something close to criminal intentions about Bellows person. (The reporter in question, of course, suffered no sanction from his employer for putting his aggressive fantasies in print.)

Yet just such a work was published, five years before his death, by the Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Nobel laureate in 1990 and an authentic poetry superstar. Itinerary is now available in English. To begin with the most stunning point: according to Paz, his entire creative career as a Latin literary giant grew out of the influences he underwent while living, at two different periods, in the United States. Far from viewing the U.S. as an imperialist monster crushing his spirit--as such lesser lights as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example, have portrayed it--Paz saw his experiences in California and New York as profoundly liberating.

To understand Itinerary and its significance, it is necessary to follow Paz himself back to the beginnings of his intellectual consciousness, which was formed less in Mexico, where he was born, than in Los Angeles, where he lived, albeit briefly, as a child. His father had fled there during the Mexican Revolution. An associate of the peasant revolutionary chieftain Emiliano Zapata, the elder Paz was temporarily forced across the border by the changing fortunes of his faction. From this experience, we might extrapolate one of the main aspects of Paz's career: the intensity with which he came to equate revolution with human suffering.

But Paz himself derived another meaning from his early period in Los Angeles. Although he never says it explicitly, he clearly perceived the United States as a refuge of free thought. Perhaps most importantly, his childhood journey across the border left him with a painful, but inevitably fruitful, confusion about his identity. After he returned to Mexico, his chauvinistic compatriots, observing that he spoke English as well as Spanish, labeled him a foreigner. Their rejection deeply affected him. As he wrote in Itinerary seventy years later, "My experiences in Los Angeles and in Mexico weighed down on me for many years. Sometimes I felt guilty--we are often accomplices of our persecutors--and would say to myself: yes, I am neither from here nor from there."

Paz was, like any other youthful intellectual of that time, sympathetic to the Soviets. But the Spanish Civil War changed everything, as it did for George Orwell and John Dos Passos. "I discovered that the revolution is a child of criticism and that the absence of criticism [on the side of the Spanish left] had killed the revolution" he recalled, somewhat wistfully. His first doubt began on a train going into Spain, in the company of the English poet Stephen Spender, the Cuban Communist writers Juan Marinello and Nicolas Guillen, and others including the Russian author Ilya Ehrenburg and the Chilean Pablo Neruda.

Neruda had, earlier on, been generous to the young Paz after the publication of the latter's first volume of verses, but on the train heading into the Spanish darkness--evening had come as the travellers reached the Pyrenean frontier--another side of the Chilean was revealed. He led Paz and his companion, the Mexican poet Carlos Pellicer, to a meeting in the dining car with Ehrenburg, famous for his writing about Mexico and his friendship with the muralist Diego Rivera. The group was jolly enough until Pellicer described his most recent dinner with the painter, who had become a follower of the banished Leon Trotsky. Indeed, Rivera had welcomed Trotsky to Mexico.

We can envision the scene: the train speeding into Spain, through a night broken only by lights from villages in the Catalan foothills, the companionship of the intellectuals interrupted by a dreadful silence. Ehrenburg, at first wordless and indifferent, suddenly asks Pellicer his opinion of Trotsky. "Trotsky? He is history's greatest political agitator ... after, obviously, Saint Paul" the Mexican replies. "We laughed hollowly" Paz wrote. "Ehrenburg stood up and Neruda whispered in my ear: `That Catholic poet will get us shot'"

In Valencia, at a congress of anti-fascist intellectuals, Paz watched in disgust as the Communists and fellow-travellers attacked the reputation of Andre Gide, who had written critically about Stalinist Russia. Paz's mentor Jose Bosch, who had joined the anti-Stalinist Partit Obrer d'Unificacio Marxista (POUM)--the `Workers' Party of Marxist Unity in whose militias Orwell served--was forced to go underground to escape the Communist police. Paz learned that the outstanding poets Luis Cernuda and Leon Felipe had been called in and questioned by agents of the same police, controlled from Moscow. And he was shocked at the disappearance--and, obviously, murder--of the POUM's leader, the Catalan literary figure Andreu Nin.

Paz was then only twenty-three, and, he wrote in Itinerary,

   [A]ll this disturbed my little ideological system but did not alter my
   feelings for the cause.... My case is not exceptional; the clash between
   what we think and what we feel is common. My doubts did not touch the basis
   of my convictions, the revolution still seemed, despite the deviations and
   roundabouts of history, the sole door out of the impasse of our century.

At first he considered suppressing his ambivalence by serving in the ranks of the Spanish Republican forces, but he was turned down and went back to Mexico to help start a pro-Communist daily.

There he was confronted, if only at second-hand, with the thing that would decide matters definitively for him: the murder plot against Trotsky. In fact, Paz broke with the Communists before the actual murder in 1940, because of an incident preceding it. In May of that year the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros had led a party of Soviet-controlled terrorists in a failed shooting attack on Trotsky's residence. Paz notes that Neruda, who was serving as a Chilean diplomat in the Mexican capital, "facilitated Siqueiros's entry into Chile where he sought asylum" after the May assault. Paz had been close to Siqueiros and recalled with sadness how

   The raid [on Trotsky's house] liquidated my doubts and vacillations but
   left me in the dark as to which path I should take. It was impossible to
   continue to collaborate with the Stalinists and their friends; at the same
   time, what could I do? I felt intellectually and morally defenseless. I was
   alone. The sentimental damage was not less deep; I had to break with many
   dear friends.

He found a new set of associates among the anti-fascist, anti-Stalinist emigres who sheltered in Mexico City after the fall of France to the Nazis. They included the Russo-Belgian writer Victor Serge, who had been an anarchist, a Bolshevik, and a Trotskyist prisoner in Siberia, the surrealist poet and Trotskyist Benjamin Peret, the novelist Jean Malaquais, whose political proclivities, at least, followed the same lines, the French anthropologist Paul Rivet, and a number of exiled intellectuals from the POUM.

Serge got Paz reading Partisan Review, and the young Mexican lived in the United States in 1943-45.

   I lived in San Francisco and in New York, I spent a summer in Vermont and
   two weeks in Washington.... I voraciously read English and North American
   poets and, at last, started to write poems free from the rhetoric that
   stifled the poetry written by young poets of that time in Spain and Latin
   America. In a word, I was born again. I had never felt so alive.

After his rupture with the left, with its coda in the collapse of the Russian empire, everything else is anticlimactic, including his meditations on India, where he lived for years, and on the eventual criminality of the so-called Third World revolutions. Itinerary slides a bit toward the end, when Paz attempts a criticism of the excesses of the free market--though he mainly expresses repulsion at "the vulgarity of passions, the uniformity of tastes, ideas, and convictions" that have become prevalent in modern society. But his extended loss of faith in the left was clearly the defining element in his life, comparable to the evolution described in the memoirs of Norman Podhoretz. Paz was never afraid to stand alone, although he was obviously hurt by the vicious attacks on him, especially in Mexico.

In "How and Why I Wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude" a brief essay included in Itinerary, he wrote, "the wave of hate and mud lasted many years ... some of the stains are still fresh" When, in 1951, he published a compilation in Spanish on the Soviet concentration camps, drawn from the official Muscovite legal code as well as statements by witnesses, "the only answer, typically, was silence. Or in the Mexican version: they `nobodied' me." That is, he was subjected to the practice, as common in Western cities today as it once was in the totalitarian capitals, of total ostracism. "I was floating adrift," he wrote. "The disintoxication therapy had not completely ended; I still had a lot to learn, and, more than anything, to unlearn." Although some of the details are left out of this book, Paz underwent all the same obloquy again and again, to the end of his life. One pretext was his criticism of the Castro regime, which was repeated when the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua; there were many more.

Itinerary is an extraordinary book, even a minor masterpiece; the only question is whether any of those who are most likely to purchase it will gain anything from it. I have my doubts about that, and they are accentuated by the unfortunate presentation of the Anglo-American edition, which evinces all the common faults in translinguistic confections of this type. Jason Wilson, the translator, is described as a professor of Latin American literature at University College, London, who has written extensively on and knew Paz. Professor Wilson has tacked on an afterword to this edition that adds nothing to our understanding of the book. It does, however, offer a jarring note of political correctness: where Paz presented a negative view of the Stalinism of Pablo Neruda, Professor Wilson praises Neruda for his involvement in "crucial interventions" on the topic of being "revolutionary and responsible."

Professor Wilson has also committed some execrable errors of translation and editing. For example, why does he add the phrase "An Intellectual Journey" as a subtitle to Itinerary? It does not figure in the Mexican edition and is a flat cliche that clashes with Paz's elegant style. Paz never wrote that way. I also do not comprehend how a professor of Latin American literature at University College, London, can show so little facility in Spanish translation. Some of the renderings in this edition are merely clumsy. Others are genuinely weird. I cannot imagine why the Spanish word "penuria" i.e., "penury", or "poverty" or "misery," should be rendered as "dearth," so that we read "In France the years in the wake of the Second World War were of dearth but of great intellectual liveliness" We find the phrase "objeto de la historia" twice rendered as "history's butt" resulting in the ridiculous sentence, "We have ceased to be the butts and are beginning to be subjects of historical changes" This is something beyond mistranslation; either Professor Wilson does not know the language adequately, and is working mainly from a dictionary, or he is too clever by more than half and has gotten himself in over his head.

Elsewhere, Professor Wilson is extremely proud of himself for having corrected a misspelling, apparently by Paz, of the name of James Burnham, the "proto-neocon." But Professor Wilson manages to consistently misspell the name of Andreu Nin as Nim, adding an extra element of ignominy to the death of this martyr to Stalinism. He is also incorrect about Nin's party, the POUM, which he misdescribes in the footnotes as anarchist; they were anti-Stalinist Marxists. Such mistakes abound in this book.

Professor Wilson's failings are not confined to simple ignorance. He has suppressed a positive comment about Hannah Arendt that appeared in the Mexican edition, and which should have been included in note 53. In addition, where Paz wrote critically about the Cuban cultural functionary Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Professor Wilson subverts his intent by adding a footnote in dishonest praise of him.

How does a major, summary contribution by a Spanish-language author end up so mutilated? Better to ask "why"; "how" is too obvious to anybody who knows the literary world today. And in the case of Paz, why matters most. Put simply, Paz's work is abused in this manner for the same reason few who buy this volume will even attempt to understand it. Paz became an idol, and most of those who worship at his altar in the Anglo-American world know or care very, very little about what he really had to say. Octavio Paz is gone now and can no longer defend himself from the acolytes of Neruda, Castro, and others he saw as the enemies of conscience.

Stephen Schwartz's latest book is Intellectuals and Assassins (Anthem).