The Monkey Grammarian

by Octavio Paz

Book Overview

Written while Paz was the Mexican ambassador to India, The Monkey Grammarian is a dazzling mind-journey to the temple city of Gatta. 'A sumptuous feast of visual imagery' - San Francisco Chronicle... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394518071
• ISBN13: 9780394518077
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Seaver Books
• Length: 162 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

The very concept of grammar - a system in which language can be fixed, structured and therefore transformed - is one of the great achievements of Indian culture. In the past 50 years philosophers and linguists have devoted enormous intellectual energies to the investigation of how the concept was developed among the thinkers of ancient India, for whom the idea became a central problem in their philosophical tradition. Was language, our faculty for naming objects, given by God or did man invent it, either on his own or with powers borrowed from the divine realm? Through a species of time-space journey akin to Hanuman's, Octavio Paz explores this dilemma: ''What is language made of,'' he asks, ''and most important of all, is it already made, or is it something that is perpetually in the making?''