by Octavio Paz (Author), Eliot Weinberger (Translator)
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."