When Octavio Paz (1914-1998) died, Mexico lost a tribe of writers. He was many poets, from the surrealist disciple of Andre Breton to the admiring imitator of Alexander Pope; now a radical experimentalist, now an autobiographer and confessional write...

"Airborn" is a bilingual sequence of sonnets written jointly by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and his English fellow poet and translator Charles Tomlinson. In their forewords the poets explain how the poems came to be written and translated. As Charle...