Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot
Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence

Tom Boll

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Legenda (General Series)

Legenda

10 October 2012  •  243pp

ISBN: 978-1-906540-43-2 (hardback)  •  RRP £80, $110, €95

ISBN: 978-1-351193-95-5 (Taylor & Francis ebook)

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Octavio Paz (1914-1998) declared that when he discovered The Waste Land in Spanish translation as a sixteen-year-old, it ‘opened the doors of modern poetry’. The influence of T. S. Eliot would accompany Paz throughout his career, defining many of his key poems and pronouncements. Yet Paz’s attitude towards his precursor was ambivalent. Boll’s study traces the history of Paz’s engagement with Eliot in Latin American and Spanish periodicals of the 1930s and 40s. It reveals the fault lines that run through the work of the dominant figure in recent Mexican letters. By reading Eliot in a Latin American context, it also offers new perspectives on relations between Anglo-American modernism and the international avant-garde.

Tom Boll is Lecturer in Spanish and Spanish American Studies and Translation at King’s College London.

Reviews:

  • ‘What has been missing from Paz scholarship so far are comparative studies that take a larger international approach to a poet who prided himself on his intellectual cosmopolitanism... Tom Boll’s Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot is a welcome contribution in this direction. It presents a careful and impressively researched study of young Paz’s reflections on Eliot’s poetry, which the former repeatedly acknowledged as one of the most important influences on his early work and on his vision of modernity.’ — Rubén Gallo, Modernism/modernity 21.2, April 2014, 564-65

Bibliography entry:

Boll, Tom, Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot: Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence (Legenda, 2012)

First footnote reference: 35 Tom Boll, Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot: Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence (Legenda, 2012), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Boll, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Boll, Tom. 2012. Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot: Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Boll 2012: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Boll 2012: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

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