Sunstone provides the master plot of Mr. Paz’s poetry and his vision of history.

New York Times Book Review

Sunstone

by Octavio Paz

Translated from Spanish by Eliot Weinberger

Edited by Eliot Weinberger

Nobel laureate Octavio Paz’s premier long poem Sunstone/Piedra de Sol is here printed as a separate volume, with beautiful illustrations from an eighteenth-century treatise on the Mexican calendar. Presented in Eliot Weinberger’s excellent new translation with the Spanish texts en face, this is the 1957 poem “that definitively established Paz as a major international figure” (Sagetrieb). Written as a single cyclical sentence (at the end of the poem the first six lines are written again), Sunstone is a tour de force of momentum. It takes as its structural basis the circular Aztec calendar, which measured the synodic period of the planet Venus (584 days––the number of lines of Sunstone). But, as The New Republic noted, “this esoteric correlative design… does not circumscribe its subject. [It is] a lyrically discursive exploration of time and memory, of erotic love, of art and writing.”

Paperback(published Oct, 01 1991)

ISBN
9780811211956
Price US
11.95
Page Count
60

Clothbound(published Oct, 01 1991)

ISBN
9780811211970
Page Count
60
Portrait of Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

Twentieth-century Mexican Poet

Sunstone provides the master plot of Mr. Paz’s poetry and his vision of history.

New York Times Book Review