Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

<p><strong>Nobel laureate Octavio Paz's premier long poem <em>Sunstone/Piedra de Sol</em> is here presented as a separate volume, with beautiful illustrations from an eighteenth-century treatise on the Mexican calendar.</strong></p> Presented in Eliot Weinberger's excellent new translation with the Spanish texts <em>en face</em>, this is the 1957 poem "that definitively established Paz as a major international figure" (<em>Sagetrieb</em>). Written as a single cyclical sentence (at the end of the poem the first six lines are written again), <em>Sunstone</em> 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 <em>Sunstone</em>). 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." Black-and-white illustrations