Paz, Octavio

28 letters signed "Octavio Paz", then "Octavio" including 11 autograph letters, 16 typescript letters with autograph notes and 1 telegram, 43 pages (size varies), in Spanish (one letter in French, one in English). With: Octavio Paz. Apariencia desnuda. La Obra de Marcel Duchamp. Mexico, Bibioteca Era, 1973. Incribed by the author "A Monique, con mi gratitud a la traductora y mi antigua, fiel amistad. Octavio. Cambridge, Mass, 12 de Diciembre 1976." The copy is corrected and annotated by this author for a French translation, comprising about 80 autograph corrections by Paz. With: Octavio Paz, “The Centurions of Santiago” (28 September 1973), Original English typescript, 7 pages, with handwritten corrections and additions in the hand of Octavio Paz (black ink) and Fong (purple ink). The text, published in Descent, was written on the occasion of General Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile + Carbon copy of final version. 
With: Autograph and typescript letters to Monique Fong signed Robert Lebel (1), Marie-Jo Paz (1 - about a meeting between Octavio and Borges in Austin, Texas), Juan García de Oteyca (1), carbon copy of a letter of Octavio Pax to the Cultural Program of the XIX Olympics held in Mexico, carbon of the poem "Mexico: Olimpíada de 1968," carbon copy of Monique Fong's translation and other ephemera. 

Monique Fong Wust

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Monique Fong was born in Paris on 22 November 1926 to a French mother and a Chinese father. With a passionate interest in poetry and anthropology, she met André Breton at Claude Lévi-Strauss’s house in 1949. Soon after, Breton invited her to join the meetings of the surrealist group where he introduced her to Octavio Paz who had recently relocated in Paris where he worked for the Mexican Embassy. After she had left Paris for the United States, she met Marcel Duchamp who became a lifelong friend.

Paz became a friend and mentor. He introduced her to the writings of Ezra Pound, Antonio Machado, D.H. Lawrence and many others, as well as to the politics, history and culture of Mexico and, of course, his own poems and the translations done by Muriel Ruckeyser. He later sent her some of his early work: “Encontraras muchos poemas que no conoces, de mi primera época (oscilación entre el barroquismo del siglo XVII, D.H. Lawrence y cierto romanticismo alemán, más mucho rimbaldismo francés y latinoamericano”. Fong soon began translating some of this work into French.

She later sent him her own poems: “Tu poema me gusta de verdad. Lo mismo digo del que dedicas a Rauschenberg […] Hace unos meses pasaron por aquí Cage, Rauschenberg y el grupo de danzantes de Cunningham […] A mí me conquisti plenamente Cage: una mezcla de Satie y Bashô y terriblemente Yanqui, en el buen sentido (hoy casi olvidado) de la palabra”. In the same letter, he wrote: “La figura de Duchamp sigue conservando para mí toda su fascinación enigmática […] Pero lo que hacía únicos a sus hallazgos no era de ser hallazgos, ocurrencias mas o menos felíces, sino el hombre – el enigma que les confería el valor de lo irrepetible. […] Duchamp, al revés de Picasso o de Ernst o Miró, no es un camino: es el extremo límite, el muro que hay que saltar o perforar.”

Soon after moving to New York in 1966, M. Fong met John Cage whose Silence she wanted to translate. She had the support of Paz. In 1966, she recorded on tape an oral translation into French of an essay Paz had written on Marcel Duchamp, so that the latter’s wife could understand it. She, from New York, and he, from Delhi, then began the search for someone who would publish the text in France. After Claude Givaudan agreed to publish it as a “livre-objet” at the time his gallery was having a show of MD’s ready-mades, they exchanged letters about her translation. He suggested changes for a French audience that would be more familiar than his Mexican readers with Duchamp’s work. “Encuentro que varios pasajes son demasiado informativos y explicativos. La razón : lo escribi para un público de lengua española que conoce mal a Duchamp […]”. Commenting on a text of Fong’s that was published in France at the time of Duchamp’s 80^th birthday, Paz also wrote: “Tu texto sobre Duchamp me gusto de verdad […] Tienes razón: leyenda y misterio no son palabras que deban aplicarse a Duchamp. La que conviene es transparencia – la palabra más misteriosa del lenguaje.”

Fong continued to send Paz some of her translations of his poetry. (“Gracias por tu traducción del poema sobre Cage”) as well as an essay she had written in English “On Art and Technology,” for which he found a publisher in Mexico. He wrote her his thoughts about Cage’s work and his belief in the power of technology to promote social changes: “Yo no estoy en contra de la técnica. Tampoco en favor. Adoptar posiciones frente a ella es tan absurco como estar en favor o en contra de la montañas, los ríos o el mar. La técnica es nuestro paisaje, nuesto “environment” […] Lo que me preocupa es encontrar un puente entre ella (nuestro mundo) y nosotros (su mundo). En este sentido la aventura de Cage me apasiona: es una tentativa por llegar a la fusión (la in-fusión) de la vida humana en la tecnica – no es un panteismo sino un pantecnologismo […] hoy […] no se trata de “cambiar al mundo” (natural o social) sino “cambiar a la tecnica.”

In the late 1960’s, the Mexican Government began a “Dirty War” against left-wing students. After resigning his post as Mexican embassador to India, Paz describes in a long letter of October 5, 1969 how he finds himself the victim of censorship in his own country, not only on the part of the government but also on that of newspapers and the intelligentsia.

Paz and Fong continued their collaboration. She translated his second essay on Marcel Duchamp, Apariencia Desnuda, which was published in 1976, for which he sent her corrections and annotations.

The Paz-Fong correspondence largely dwells on their collaboration, but also documents the Nobel Prize laureate’s ideas about life, writing and poetics, his opinion on the political regime in Mexico and his intimate feelings about such important historical figures as John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.