Melinda speaks to Eugene Ionseco at Oxford in 1974

Eugene Ionesco (1909 - 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright, and one the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theater.



Ionesco was born in 1912 in Romania of a French mother and Romanian father; his formative years were spent in France. In 1925 he returned to Romania when he learnt the “native” language. He subsequently taught French. Does a perfect knowledge of two languages enrich one’s appreciation of language in general?

“Bilingualism involves a sort of intellectual acrobatics. I think that it is indispensable for my work as a writer. But I don’t believe that different languages represent totally different visions of life, nor that nationality is an isolating factor. From my experience as a bilingual speaker, I would say that there can be an exact translation from on language to another, because there is a commonly shared structure which is permanent and universal. Although children learn a different language depending on where they were born, nevertheless the process is the same in all cases. For we all have the same anxieties and ask the same questions; and nationality, like politics, is secondary to the central problem of man’s existential condition.”

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Laura Vidler's introduction to Melinda Camber Porter in Conversation with Octavio Paz

Laura Vidler, chair of the department of Spanish, University of South Dakota, Vermilion, SD, introduces the "Creative Conversations Series" between Nobel Laureate/poet Octavio Paz and artist/journalist Melinda Camber Porter.

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Melinda in Conversation with Octavio Paz

Now available from Blake Press: Melinda Camber Porter in Conversation with Octavio Paz

“The interview you are about to read, conducted in 1983, eight years before Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the record of a conversation between two spirited and original poets. Melinda is interested in Octavio’s cosmology—at first he retreats: “That’s a big question, cosmology…” he replies, but throughout the course of the interview she coaxes this out of him, artist to artist. They discuss history, psychology, the creative process, politics, eroticism, the accuracy of Milton’s Hell, and they comment on an eclectic mix of writers—though again and again the conversation returns to the poetic.

“Paz imagines not only using language, but being on it, as a wave: “I can see myself swimming in the language.” As Melinda moves down the street she sometimes becomes the words she imagines—she too is swept into the wave. Paz observes that in his work he hopes to transcend the limits of reason; the great problem of our time, he notes, is the separation of reason and the unconscious. As a young writer Melinda wonders where intellect alone will take us, and this leads the older writer to debate the triumph of rationalism, sexual repression, and the nature of love. As a reader it is a delight to follow their thought, to ride the wave that carries us to the shore of language.”

- From the introduction by Scott Chaskey

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