In the last year of his life, writer Octavio Paz received offers from various companies that wanted to buy his library and archive. “One of them was for several million dollars,” Professor Anthony Stanton, one of the leading experts on the life and work of the Mexican Nobel laureate, recalled this Friday. Stanton was making an appearance in front of a hundred people that he had never made in public before. When the professor asked the intellectual if he would accept it, he replied in four words: “I am a Mexican writer.” As of this Friday, the thinker’s legacy is preserved in the new Casa Marie Jose and Octavio Paz.
The space opened Friday in an old building with a terracotta facade in the Dacuba neighborhood at the end of a street that is home to machine shops, snack shops and carpentry shops. Some verses written by the poet in 1956 to Alejandra Frausto, the Secretary of Culture, the “forerunner” of this moment: “Every day we pass the same street or the same garden; every afternoon our eyes stumble on the same red wall in the brick and urban time. Suddenly, any day, the street is another world. Opens up, the garden is born, covered in tired wall signs. “We’re in a beautiful 17th-century mansion that’s already filled with meaning,” Frausto clarified.
The house was built in 1735 and belonged to a Peruvian family and was baptized La Perulera. Dozens of guests gathered on the central patio this Friday. Officials presiding over the event — the Mexico City government, the central Ministry of Culture and the capital’s Integrated Family Development Organization (DIF) — promised that the venue would ensure the couple’s “inventory, inventory, dissemination and protection.” tradition. “From today, this is the house for the legacy of Mary Jose and Octavio Paz,” Frausto said. Officials also announced the creation of a foundation funding and advisory board “that will always be aware of Bass’s legacy.”
The author’s legacy was in the hands of his heir and executor, the French artist Marie-José Tramini, who died in 1998. But when he died in 2018, it was necessary to initiate the succession process at the city’s High Court. of Mexico. A year later, the court designated the DIF as the “sole and universal successor” to Bass’s work. As Frausto describes it, the legacy the house preserves “includes approximately 70,000 documents, 8,138 books, 476 works of art, 472 decorative arts, 651 pieces of jewelry, 64 items of clothing, and 50 miscellaneous household items and furniture.” Additionally, “360 audiovisual material is continuously cataloged and processed.”
On the ground floor of the house is the laboratory of the National Center for the Preservation and Registration of Movable Art Heritage (Cencropam), where 31 people are currently working to maintain these objects. There are also some of the prizes Paz won – the Nobel Prize for Literature (1990) and Cervantes (1981), among others – and the most famous library in his house on Río Guadalquivir Street, made of wood from Japan. . On the first floor there are seven rooms with furniture, for example, brought from India —the poet was ambassador there in the sixties—; personal items such as photographs; documents; Paintings by Rufino Tamayo or Antoni Tapis and works by Tramini.
Located at 445 Felipe Carrillo Puerto Street, the house will be run by poet, essayist and cultural promoter Leticia Luna. In this first phase, the public will be able to make appointments to visit it and consult part of the archive. But in addition, the home will offer workshops for children and teenagers, as well as reading spaces for them. You can already see the two books Bass has written for children. The tree speaks And quicksand. “The location of this property is very important to us, a neighborhood that has not had an open cultural space to date,” Frausto said.
A long legal road
Officials also disclosed some details about the poet’s copyright. Since Tramini died five years ago, there was uncertainty about it. As explained by the authorities, Bass’s copyright “started to be administered from the first months of 2021” and “all” requests received were “considered.” As reported this Friday, there are new versions in Russian, Czech, Scottish, Vietnamese, Bulgarian; Contracts with the publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica were renewed and rights were granted to 20 publications.
“As the legal process allowed us, we granted editing, translation and adaptation permissions, which allow us to maintain the validity and presence of Octavio Paz’s work in Mexico and the world,” said Claudia Scheinbaum, president of the Mexico City government. The policy emphasized that the legal pathway was “comprehensive”. “The opening of this house is one of the last stops on the initial journey,” he said of a legal process that has yet to be closed, adding: “We have decided to open this place to the public for an exercise in transparency. Work done so far.”
Officials wanted to hasten the opening of the house to coincide with Bass’s birthday this Friday, March 31, when he would have turned 109. But for that reason, there are also unanswered questions, such as when a journalist asked the undersecretary for cultural development, Marina Nunez, about the house’s budget: “The resources are provided by the Mexico City government, we put it in kind. The amount is variable: from three million pesos in one year to nine or so in another. Up to eight.This is variable because it depends on the needs we have.
In his address, Professor Stanton had warned of the challenge for authorities to consider the thinker’s legacy of governance. “Today the opportunity arises to show that national institutions are capable of preserving and disseminating the entire collection of our only Nobel laureate for literature, our only Nobel laureate for literature and her fellow artist Marie José Tramini. This is a challenge in a country of inherent distrust,” he pronounced, adding: “Many After years of uncertainty, his legacy finally has the potential to be assured.”
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