An old man in a dry month

Stephen Spender THE MONKEY GRAMMARIAN by Octavio Paz

Peter Owen, £14.95, pp.162

The dazzling verbal tapestry of this performance — part prose, part poem — is so miraculously conveyed in the translation by Helen R. Lane that it is difficult for the English reader to believe that he loses anything of the Spanish original. One reason for this is that the densely woven content of Indian mythology, with gods and sacred figures, architecture, foliage and ideas, can, in their ordered complex- ity, be transmuted into another language, like music transcribed for another instru- ment, or as biblical texts can be, from the Hebrew into English. Sheer elaboration forces its pattern onto the receiving lan- guage.

There is, also, a feeling of universality about The Monkey Grammarian: and this may be because Octavio Paz — like certain other Latin-American writers of this cen- tury — seems in his work, as in his greatly distinguished life, to belong to world litera- tdre.

Latin-American states have a tradition of making their poets their representatives abroad: Pablo Neruda was Chilean ambas- sador to London; and Octavio Paz Mex- ican ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968. This book seems soaked in the Indian experience and gives one the feeling of shrines in Rajistan from which, as a tourist, one is largely cut off by the conditions of tourism, as, travelling there a few months ago, I was made ruefully aware.

The setting of The Monkey Grammarian is the mostly ruined Holy City of Galta in Rajistan amid its hills and great variety of trees. The poem, descriptively a travelogue (in this greatly helped by the excellent photographs of Eusebio Rojas), falls with- in the literary convention of the journey through a real landscape — real time and real place — which is also an interior journey within the poet's inner world — his mind. The journey corresponds to some particular period in the poet's life — a crisis realised in the poetry. One is reminded, perhaps, of St Jean Perse's `Anabase', translated in the Thir- ties by T. S. Eliot; and, more importantly, by Eliot's attitude to his own life, in 'Four Quartets', a journey through time, which is also outside time. There is no stylistic influence, and yet Paz seems haunted by Eliot who, to Paz, is not so much the Anglican as the mystic. (I am reminded, reading this book, of hearing Eliot say to the Chilean poet, Gabriele Mistral, when after winning the Nobel Prize she visited London in 1945 that, as a young man, he almost became a Buddhist.) In the first section, Octavio Paz writes: Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not journey forth, nor would there be any paths. But the end is the refutation and the condemnation of the path: at the end, the path dissolves, the meeting fades away to nothingness. And the end — it too fades away to nothingness.

Setting forth once more, embarking upon the search once again: the narrow path snakes among livid rocks and desolate, camel-coloured hills; white houses hanging suspended from cliffs, looking as though they were about to let go and fall on the wayfarer's head; the smell of sweating hides and cow dung; the buzz of afternoon; the screams of monkeys leaping about amid the branches of the trees or scampering along the flat roof- tops or swinging from the railings of a balcony; overhead, birds circling and the bluish spirals of smoke rising from kitchen fires; the almost pink light on the stones; the taste of salt on parched lips; the sound of loose earth slithering away beneath one's feet; the dust that clings to one's sweat- drenched skin, makes one's eyes red, and chokes one's lungs: images, memories, frag- mentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye as one sets forth to meet. . The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.

One needs quote at some length to convey an idea of the density and at the same time the economy of the language. The words essentially are the place with hills, architecture, monkeys, birds, and that all-pervasive sandalwood-and-dung smell of India and, underlying the sensual- ity and the poverty, the timelessly sacred. Two holy Hindu figures run through the poem: one is the sacred monkey Hanu- man, Hanumat, Hanumat, who, legend relates, 'leaped from India to Ceylon in one bound. According to John Dowson's A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology (quoted here), 'no one equals him in the sa-stras, in learning, and in ascertaining the sense of the scriptures (or in moving at will).' Hanuman is also 'the ninth author of grammar.' The other is female, called Splendor.

Hanuman is here the projection of the poet's persona, embodying the seething and spectacular life of the place, but also expressing doubts about the nature of

language — or the language of nature. `Sitting astride the towering wall, he con- templates the dense grove, scratches his bald rump, and says to himself: delight to the eye, defeat of reason.' What Hanuman sees through his eyes codes its message on his brain: 'Hanuman smiles at the analogy which has just occurred to him: calligraphy and vegetation, a grove of trees and writing, reading and a path. . . . The path as a reading: an interpretation of the natural world?'

The intense and rushing pressure of the outer world pours through the senses, transforming itself into interior world whether of the poet, Octavio, or the monkey, Hanuman. Octavio Paz describes — recreates — a vividly real external nature which becomes in his language a vividly real interior vision. Then, regarding the external world seen and the inner vision of it both as language, he questions the reality of language. The unreal is the real, the real the unreal: which is, surely, precisely the situation of our human con- sciousness at our moments of greatest awareness: perceiving reality to the utmost and then perceiving that one has no know- ledge of the real.

What distinguishes Paz from Eliot in this view of reality is that with Eliot, beautiful as are certain descriptive passages in 'Four Quartets', there is a certain overall trans- parent greyness of the inner tone. With Paz

there is exuberance of the material of both inner and outer world, even when doubt is being thrown on the existence of the reality outside the language employed — which itself is unreal.

Contemplating the largely ruined city of Galta — not so very old by standards of great antiquity — the poet reflects that the architecture of the princes of Rajistan was not meant to last:

The princes of Rajistan were sovereigns doomed to disappear and they knew it . . . they erected edifices that were not intended to last but to dazzle and fascinate. Illusionist castles that instead of vanishing in the air rest on water: architecture transformed into a mere geometric pattern of reflections float- ing on the surface of a pool, dissipated by the slightest breath of air.

Symmetrical with the male figure of Hanu- man is the female figure of Splendor, the female principle enshrined in all Hindu art. Here it has, I suspect, smiling reference to Octavio Paz's wife (to whom the book is dedicated) and to whom, while he was ambassador in India, he became married. It seems a likely guess that this passionate- ly virile hymn is, in one of its aspects, a love poem celebrating their marriage. The Monkey Grammarian is a mature master- piece of penetrating intelligence, humor- ous gravity, the fruit of a lifetime, both believing and unbelieving, which makes one feel the truth of the phrase, 'Ripeness is all.'