Nobel laureate Octavio Paz's premier long poem Sunstone/Piedra de Sol is here presented 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, or art and writing."
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9780811211956
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication Date: 10-17-1991
Pages: 60
Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)
About the Author
Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was born in Mexico City. He wrote many volumes of poetry, as well as a prolific body of remarkable works of nonfiction on subjects as varied as poetics, literary and art criticism, politics, culture, and Mexican history. He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1977, the Cervantes Prize in 1981, and the Neustadt Prize in 1982. He received the German Peace Prize for his political work, and finally, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, editor, and translator. He lives in New York City.