The slim surrealistic volume of prose poetry ¿Águila o sol? (1951) takes its title from a Mexican coin with an eagle and the sun on opposing sides. The phrase, equivalent to the English “heads or tails,” underscores a characteristic theme for Paz: the reconciliation of opposites. The eagle on the coin was a symbol of the ancient Aztec Empire, and the sun on the coin’s reverse served as the center of Aztec cosmology. While the title suggests random chance and opposition, Paz unifies the duality into a new creative experience.

The typography of the prose poems breaks with the traditional line structure of lyric poetry, opening the form to all sorts of possibilities. Paz believed that poetry was not bound by form but was instead the occasion of a liberating experience mediating text and reader.

For Paz, poetry had the power to resolve duality. Structure and form illustrate this power, and Paz synthesizes the genres of poetry and prose. The volume is divided into three major sections. Trabajos del poeta (Works of the Poet) is written in numbered paragraphs. In this section, Paz engages in a personal battle with language. The prologue begins, “Today I fight alone with a word. That which belongs to me, to which I belong: heads or tails, eagle or sun?” The labor of finding the right word when “a simple monosyllable would be enough to make the world burst” led him to abandon many of the relationships and pleasures others seek. Yet by eliminating these purveyors of “infected language,” the poet opens himself to a new language: poetry.

Nevertheless, the work of the poet is Sisyphean, since he must repeat the struggle to find the experience—with every poem. The speaker struggles with words, with language, with himself, and with history throughout the collection.

The second section, titled Arenas movedizas (Quicksand), is much like a short story about a nightmare. The speaker awakens during a night spent at an inn and walks out into the deserted landscape. There he encounters an Indian peasant who asks for the speaker’s eyes for his fiancée, who “wants a little bunch of blue eyes.” The Indian forces the narrator to kneel, raises his machete, and shines a light into the eyes. At that point, he realizes the eyes are not blue and releases the narrator, who returns to the inn.

This gruesome nightmare symbolizes the struggle within Paz between Mexican and cosmopolitan influences, including that of the surrealists. The parable raises questions about the nature of poetry and the poet. Blue eyes, the eyes of foreigners, will not be the source of true poetry; the poet must look to his roots.

Paz sees the poet’s creativity as linked to the regeneration of nature. In the last section, with the same title as the volume (¿Águila o sol?), Paz returns to Mexico’s pre-Columbian past, his childhood, and the topic of poetry. Removed from his country and his language, the poet is entrapped. It is only when he is able to find a unity with his past that he has the freedom to create.

In the final poem of the volume, Hacia el poema (Toward the Poem), Paz writes,

“We turn and turn in the animal belly, in the mineral belly, in the belly of time.
To find the way out: the poem.”

The typography in this section more closely resembles poetry’s lineation. The one- or two-sentence strophes make suggestions as to the origin of poetry. The fourth paragraph hints that in order to create, the poet must give up his beliefs about history, language, and poetry and set free the words he holds.

In the final paragraph, Paz merges the two sides of the coin when the rule of the “incandescent eagles” is united with the “future noon” and “the solar song,” and the poet is free to sing. To use “words, phrases, syllables, stars that turn around a fixed center . . . that meet in a word” becomes the poet’s goal because, when that happens, the poem also “creates a loving order.” This loving, caring, better world is not only the subject of poetry, it is also brought into being by the poem itself.

Bibliography
Paz, Octavio. ¿Águila o sol? Translated by Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions Books, 1976.

Categories: British Literature, Caribbean Literature, Literature

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