Piedra de Sol ("Sunstone") is the poem written by Octavio Paz in 1957 that helped launch his international reputation. In the presentation speech of his Nobel Prize in 1990, ''Sunstone'' was later praised as "one of the high points of Paz's poetry…This suggestive work with its many layers of meaning seems to incorporate, interpret and reconstrue major existential questions, death, time, love and reality".

The poem

''Sunstone'' is a circular poem based on the circular Aztec calendar, and consists of a single cyclical sentence reflecting the synodic period of the planet Venus. The poem has 584 lines in hendecasyllables, corresponding to that 584-day period, and its ongoing thrust is emphasised by having no

full stop The full stop (Commonwealth English), period (North American English), or full point , is a punctuation mark. It is used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence (as distinguished from a question or exclamation ...

s, only

comma The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline ...

s, semi-colons and colons. The first six lines of the poem repeat themselves again at the end of the poem in a movement that "doubles back, and comes full circle,/ forever arriving". The poem was welcomed in Mexico as an abandonment of Paz's European surrealistic style and a return to the "sensible inner voice" of his earlier preoccupations. In it, instead of imposing his interpretation of history upon the poem, Paz submits himself to the historical calendar and finds his own interpretation within it. As he later explained in an interview: :What I mean to say is that, over the circular time of myth, is inserted the unrepeatable history of one man that belongs to one country, to one generation and one era…Time may be cyclical, and thus immortal…but man is finite and unrepeatable. What is repeated is the experience of finitude: all men know that they will die…These experiences are historical, they happen and they happen to us…At the same time they are not historical, they are repeated. In this way, according to the analysis of the poem by

José Emilio Pacheco José Emilio Pacheco Berny (June 30, 1939 – January 26, 2014) was a Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the second half of the 20th century. The Berlin International Lite ...

, while Paz recapitulates personal experiences, he also balances these with female cultural figures (Melusine, Laura, Persephone, Isabel, Maria) in "an interplay between the private and the collective" where "the poet reads himself as he reads history" in a dialogue from which he cannot emerge.

Translations

Three years after its publication, the poem was translated into Swedish by

Artur Lundkvist Nils Artur Lundkvist (3 March 1906 – 11 December 1991) was a Swedish writer, poet and literary critic. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1968. Artur Lundkvist published around 80 books, including poetry, prose poems, essays, short ...

, and appeared as ''Solsten'' in the composite volume ''Den våldsamma årstiden'' (1960). It was followed by translations into French by

Benjamin Péret Benjamin Péret (4 July 1899 – 18 September 1959) was a French poet, Parisian Dadaist and a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement with his avid use of Surrealist automatism. Biography Benjamin Péret was born in Rezé, ...

(''Pierre de Soleil'', Gallimard, Paris, 1962); into Hungarian by György Somlyó (''Napköve'', Magyar Helikon, Budapest 1965); and into Greek by Serge Makais (Ηλιόπετρα, 1965). There have also been four translations into English. Muriel Rukeyser's was published as ''Sun Stone/Piedra de Sol'' in a bilingual edition (New Directions, 1962) and was followed by Peter Miller's ''Sun-Stone'' in Canada (Contact, Toronto, 1963) and Donald Gardner's ''Piedra de Sol: The Sun Stone'' in the UK (Cosmos Publications, York, 1969). Another translation by Eliot Weinberger was published in 1987 as the first poem in the composite ''The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987'' (New Directions, New York, 1987). In 1991 the translated poem appeared separately in an illustrated bilingual edition from New Directions Publishing.WorldCat
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References

Eliot Weinberger, ''The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987'', Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1988. {{reflist Mexican literature Spanish-language poems 1957 poems Octavio Paz