Sunstone
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...
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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." Black-and-white illustrations
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780811211956 (0811211959)
Publish date: October 17th 1991
Publisher: New Directions
Pages no: 60
Edition language: English
" the Aztec calendar consisted of a ritual cycle of 260 days and a 365-day civil cycle. The ritual cycle, or tonalpohualli, contained two smaller cycles, an ordered sequence of 20 named days and a sequence of days numbered from 1 to 13. The 13-day cycle was particularly important for religious obser...