Colour and Landscape in Octavio Paz's Libertad bajo palabra [Parole] (1935-1957)

CHAZARRETA, DANIELA EVANGELINA

CABA

Congreso; AIC 2019 Midterm Meeting of the International Colour Association; 2019

International Colour Association y Universidad de Belgrano

The paper?s purpose is to analyze the colour significations in Octavio Paz?s Libertad bajo palabra [Parole] (1935-1957) in connection with landscape. This cathegory (landscape) appears, by the way, in garden and paramo figures. Landscape is considering as a nature figure (Silvestri 2011) and appears in many literary texts, texts conceived as places where social, cultural and aesthetic reflections are viable and fruitful (Collot 2011, Ferreira Alves y Feitosa 2010). This is the case of Libertad bajo palabra [Parole] (1935-1957): this book of poems shows a lean palette principally and exclusively composed by green, sepia and golden. The first mentioned colours are in connection with settings designed in the book: garden and paramo. The golden is linked to the light poetry also present in Libertad bajo palabra. Significantly, the green is the predominant colour throughout the poems. I am firstly interested in underlying that the Paz?s taste in colour comes from the necessity of renewal the poetics strategies as the hole modern poetry does (Hamburger 1982); in this context, is important to consider the engagement between poetry and visual arts too (Manrique 1974). Secondly, I am interested in pondering that the green colour symbolizes full life and transcendence just like nature (one of the most fundamental categories in Libertad bajo palabra). Finally, the sepia recovers the paramo landscape that represents the creative aridity of the poet and the modern individual alienation; the paramo is the opposite of the garden which suggests the harmony. The garden, then, implies a nature appropriation as nature is conceived as a perfect orb but inaccessible to human being. The figure used to set appropriation is the analogy. By focusing in landscape, Octavio Paz can build two interesting poetic strategies. The first one is to distinguish from the nationalistic aesthetics (Diego Rivera?s muralism is a good example of this); the second one allows him to build the own culture from universal categories (landscape and colour), that is to say, expressing the own by a universal and comprehensive language (the long and prestigious landscape tradition and also the modern poetry tradition of symbolic use of colour in modern poetry).