SOURCE: Mujica, Barbara. “A Tale of Two Gardens.” Americas (English Edition) 50, no. 4 (August 1998): 60.

In the following essay, Mujica reviews Paz's A Tale of Two Gardens, which contains poems about India written between 1952 and 1995.

Octavio Paz was obsessed with India. Although many American and European writers have been fascinated with the subcontinent, none has studied its culture with the intensity and thoroughness of Paz. The Mexican Nobel laureate was an expert, having researched Indian religions, history, politics, philosophy, and literature and written on Buddhism, the caste system, tantric art, and many other aspects of Indian thought. India, in the words of Paz's translator Eliot Weinberger, was “the other to [Paz's] self-described otherness as a Mexican.”

A Tale of Two Gardens contains Paz's poems on India written between 1952 and 1995. In 1951 the Mexican government sent Paz to India as a minor functionary in the first diplomatic delegation to the new nation...