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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), show more 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." show less

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Author Information

Picture of author.
324+ Works 9,919 Members
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, Mexico on March 31, 1914. In 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller. In 1943, he travelled to the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry. He entered the Mexican diplomatic service in 1945 and was sent to France then India. In show more 1968, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's suppression of the student demonstrations during the Olympic Games in Mexico. He was a poet and an essayist. His works include The Labyrinth of Solitude, The Grammarian Monkey, East Slope, and The Other Mexico. He received numerous awards including the Cervantes award in 1981, the American Neustadt Prize in 1982, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. He also worked as an editor and publisher. He founded two magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural and Vuelta. He died of cancer on April 19, 1998. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Common Knowledge

Canonical title
Sunstone
Original title
Piedra De Sol
Original publication date
1957

Classifications

Genres
Poetry, Fiction and Literature
DDC/MDS
861Literature & rhetoricSpanish LiteratureSpanish poetry
LCC
PQ7297 .P285 .P5Language and LiteratureFrench, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literaturesSpanish literatureProvincial, local, colonial, etc.Spanish America
BISAC

Statistics

Members
144
Popularity
227,472
Reviews
1
Rating
(4.17)
Languages
9 — Dutch, English, Finnish, Greek, Italian, Multiple languages, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish
Media
Paper
ISBNs
15