The Literary Fly Fisher

Octavio Paz besökte Malmö Internationella Poesifestival 1988, John Leffmann.

Octavio Paz (1914-1998), the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, was a Mexican poet and intellectual. He served in the Mexican diplomatic service, lectured at Cambridge and Harvard, and was awarded many prizes for his writings. While I do not support some of his later political stances, I find his poetry insightful and occasionally intoxicating. Here, I share a short poem, from a larger series of similar poems, first published in 1955. It is titled “Objetos” or “Objects.” In three lines, Pas captures our tendency to objectify the world around us, in our daily lives. And he indicates how powerful it is, when we break this tendency and recognize the vitality of our surroundings, human and otherwise. For me, fly fishing and spending time in “nature” (by which I mean “places-less-influenced-by-humans”) provides that break.

OBJECTS

They live alongside us
we do not know them, they do not know us
But sometimes they speak with us.

(this translation from the Spanish is taken from Selected Poems, Eliot Weinberger ed. (New Directions, 1984), 6.

This entry was posted on May 12, 2016 at 11:29 PM and is filed under Environmental Literature, Fly Fishing, The Arts, The Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.