Octavio Paz/Alfonso Reyes, a symbol: the Spanish Republic, heroism and sacrifice (1936 and 1937)

Abstract

Octavio Paz, a young poet; Alfonso Reyes, an internationally recognized poet and diplomat: when they learned the news of the assault on Spanish democratic institutions by praetorians, they were outraged. Paz was in Mexico; Alfonso Reyes, in Buenos Aires. Despite the distance, they agreed on a common purpose: the defense of the Spanish Republic and its legitimate government. The murder of Federico García Lorca caused immense pain in the two poets, and in Mexico and Argentina, where they knew him very well and loved him dearly, there were protests over his death. In those ill-fated days Paz, who had just published several poems that quickly attracted attention, kept constant track of the events in Spain and, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he expressed his solidarity with the Republic and its defenders. His positioning and his literary work became known both in Mexico and in Spain, where he attended the II International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture (1937) as part of the Mexican delegation and got to know, in the following weeks, the Republican poets and their trenches.

In turn, Reyes, met in Buenos Aires with the ambassador of the Spanish Republic, Enrique Díez-Canedo, his friend from his years in Madrid, and supported him every time his duties as Mexico’s chief diplomatic representative allowed him to do so: in the issue of asylum; at the Peace Conference (1936); in his diplomatic and literary work; by accompanying the Spaniards who arrived in the Austral country. In these and other commitments the friend, the man and the diplomat sided with the Republic and what it represented.

Paz was moved and defined by his trip to Spain, while Reyes’s incessant support for the country that had welcomed him for a decade, and which he loved so much, was such that he received the recognition and the affection of both the community of Spanish Republicans based in Buenos Aires and the Argentine population. The two poets represented the spirit of that Mexico: its forthright solidarity with a friendly country which had a legitimate government and stood fast with heroism and bravery.