Melinda Camber Porter In Conversation With Octavio Paz in Cuernavaca, Mexico 1983 with Nobel Prize Lecture

Melinda Camber Porter's conversation with Octavio Paz took place in August 1983 at his home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Camber Porter traveled to Mexico to write an article on the John Huston filming of Under the Volcano (novel by Malcolm Lowery) for The Times (London). She took this opportunity to also interview Octavio Paz.

Their wide-ranging conversation included the subjects of comparative art, literature, poetry and politics in Mexico, Latin America, Europe and America, as well as Paz's reflections on writer's block. This conversation took place at the same time as the publication of the English language edition of Octavio Paz's book, Marcel Duchamp.

Dr. Laura Vidler, Chair of Spanish at the University of South Dakota, writes in her foreword, “if you think you've read this interview before [in the Partisan Review in 1986] you haven't.” As the Partisan Review redacted much of the content.

«In this new volume, however, the interview is published in its entirety, and the results are wonderful. Empathy between Paz and Camber Porter is established quickly. A professional diplomat, Paz's dual life as cultural ambassador and writer parallels Camber Porter's. Conversation about Duchamp, Picasso, Camus and Matisse-previously cut-appears here, as well as discussion of the classical Spanish poets that made up Paz's early reading-Quevedo, Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (the subject of Paz's book, Las trampas de la Fe). In addition to a complete transcription of the interview, this volume includes Paz's Nobel speech in both English and (the original) Spanish, as well as further information on the work of Melinda Camber Porter.» explains Vidler.

In the second foreword, Scott Chaskey, a poet and farmer-naturalist from Sag Harbor, New York, provides his personal inspirations received from Octavio Paz. “For forty years I have returned to this beautiful evocation by Octavio Paz from The Bow and the Lyre,” explains Chaskey. He writes on, «The interview you are about to read, conducted in 1983, eight years before Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the record of a conversation that takes place between two spirited and original poets, the Mexican master at age 69, and the young and curious British writer/artist, aged 30. Melinda Camber Porter begins with a plan, as a journalist is trained to do, but immediately following their introduction conversation begins to spin and is enlivened through a shared poetic sensibility.

Melinda is interested in Octavio's cosmology-at first he retreats: “That's a big question, cosmology…” he replies, but throughout the course of the interview she sort of coaxes some of this out of him, artist to artist. They discuss history, psychology, the creative process, politics, eroticism, the accuracy of Milton's Hell, and they comment on an eclectic mix of writers-Whitman, William Blake, Camus, Shelley, Baudelaire, Eliot, Thoreau, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz-though again and again the conversation returns to the poetic.”
In addition to Melinda Camber Porter's interview with Octavio Paz in 1983, this published edition includes Octavio Paz' 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature lecture in the original Spanish and an English translation.
Melinda Camber Porter Archive of Creative Works

Volume I: Journalism and Volume II: Art and Literature
ISSN: 2379–2450 (Print), 2379–3198 (Ebook), 2379–321X (Audio)

Website: www.MelindaCamberPorter.com
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Camber_Porter
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIflCaF2qpHh8uQgffSXLDQ