SOURCE: A review of Nostalgia for Death and Hieroglyphs of Desire: A Critical Study of Villaurrutia, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter, 1995, p. 111.

[In the following review, Mojica addresses the significance of Paz's association with the poet Xavier Villaurrutia, whose works, particularly Nostalgia for Death, prompted notable exegeses by Paz.]

Nostalgia de la muerte (1946) is the masterpiece of Xavier Villaurrutia (1903–50), a major figure in Mexico's modern literature. That such a remarkable moment in the history of Mexican poetry would find its way into an English translation is due in no small measure to Villaurrutia's relationship with another poet, one who would himself eventually become a prominent figure in the history of Spanish American letters, Octavio Paz.

Paz met Villaurrutia in Mexico in the 1930s, when the latter was already an established poet and an important figure in the Contemporáneos group and Paz was a promising young...