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| A Topoema |
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| Octavio Paz |
It was 1996, I had
some time off and was regularly loitering the book shelves of District
library, Guwahati. I was ready to gulp anything that could food for thought and
one day I picked up –The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz . I knew nothing
about him at that time except that he is a big name. I borrowed the book home, tried to read and
comprehend but most of them were smarter than me at that time. To me poetry is
to feel not to understand, so I was not bothered as long as I could feel them. What
attracted me was some bizarre line in the form juxtaposition of word and
sketch. They were named Topoema by the author.
I didn’t had a clue
what was it all about but it appealed me so much that –I had those pages
photocopied (may be illegal as per copyright act) and I am carrying those page
till today though I have moved from Guwahati to Dibrugarh then to Delhi then to Dehradun then…..over next
twenty years.Those scripts continued to puzzle me and after the advent of
internet I started to goggle what is topoeama by Octavio Paz but I found
nothing.
When I could afford
and most books become available in online shops I brought the book from
flipkart then I found some clue and fell in love with the concept of topoeama .
It seems Mr. Paz also
had some problem with words (or their meaning…also read words...
Even In net sphere now
a days there is a very very little information available on Topoema .But
gradually I became convinced that in order to escape time and space and to give
meaning and mystery to words Mr. Paz created Topema.
Later I found a
paragraph about Topoema in a Spanish language in a Spanish website and had it
translated with help of Google translate it says
“One of the most common obsessions in his poems is the
desire to escape time, which led to the creation of a poetry space whose poems
were baptized by the author under the name of topoemas (Moles +
poem). This is what poetry space, poetry as opposed to the typical temporal and
discursive. It is an intellectual and minority poetry, almost metaphysical in
sign language also includes visual signals. In topoemas, as occurred in the
poetry of the avant-garde, stress is suggestive and expressive power of visual
images. There is no doubt that the last poetry of Octavio Paz is quite
esoteric, but, beyond that, above all his poetry is noted for its lyricism and
the magical sense that the author gives to words."
I said
“Pretty surreal but damn appealing”
Much
later I was intending to fictionalize Surrealism (not that I will write about
art history but I intended to take some theme of surrealism and to write a
fiction on it),I was lost then this Topema came to my rescue by becoming a part
of the story .
