Octavio Paz y la “otra orilla”
Octavio Paz and the “Other Realm”

Summary/Abstract: The Mexican poet Octavio Paz casts doubts on the conventional way we regard reality and on the validity of the Western logic. To him, contradiction lies at the core of poetry and it liberates us by opening our mind towards another realm, “la otra orilla”. There, time defies chronology and space cannot be measured according to well-established coordinates, whereas the senses are endowed with completely different functions. The purpose of this paper is to show that the apparently incongruent metaphors become perfectly coherent at a symbolic level. They are an expression of the poet’s vision that there is an unknown world within ourselves and we can overcome the limitations of the human condition.

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