A Tale of Two Gardens.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Octavio Paz was obsessed with India. Although many American and European writers have been fascinated with the subcontinent, none has studied its culture with the intensity and thoroughness of Paz. The Mexican Nobel laureate was an expert, having researched Indian religions, history, politics, philosophy, and literature and written on Buddhism, the caste system, tantric art, and many other aspects of Indian thought. India, in the words of Paz's translator Eliot Weinberger, was "the other to [Paz's] self-described otherness as a Mexican."

A Tale of Two Gardens contains Paz's poems on India written between 1952 and 1995. In 1951 the Mexican government sent Paz to India as a minor functionary in the first diplomatic delegation to the new nation. It was then that the writer began his long love affair with the place that would be a constant in his poetry for forty years. "Mutra," his first Indian poem, was written in 1952 and records his poetic response to the exotic city of Mathura, a great nucleus of civilization in ancient India and today an important center for Krishna worship. The poem describes the beginning of the summer in subcontinental climes. By means of a multitude of impressionistic images--some erotic, some fierce, some exuberant, some cerebral--Paz captures, as he wrote to Alfonso Reyes, the fevers the nascent season "generates on the earth and in the mind."

In 1962 Paz returned to India as ambassador but resigned in 1968 as a protest against his government's massacre of student demonstrators in Mexico City. Ladera Este [East Slope], generally considered one of Paz's finest pieces of work, was written in India during this time. In the first section, the poet stands alone on a balcony, engulfed in silence: "Stillness / in the middle of the night." Delhi is "Two tall syllables / surrounded by insomnia and sand / I say them in a low voice / Nothing moves." But then the vacuum is filled by images--the Lodi gardens, golden lotuses, ficus trees, mountain passes, temples, mausoleums, goddesses. From among them emerges the face of the...