Synopses & Reviews
Presented in Eliot Weinberger's excellent new translation with the Spanish texts , this is the 1957 poem "that definitively established Paz as a major international figure" (). Written as a single cyclical sentence (at the end of the poem the first six lines are written again), 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 ). 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."
Synopsis
Weinberger has done a heroic job of bringing Paz into a lucid and quick-moving idiom.Sunstone provides the master plot of Mr. Paz's poetry and his vision of history.
Synopsis
Nobel laureate Octavio Paz's premier long poem is here presented as a separate volume, with beautiful illustrations from an eighteenth-century treatise on the Mexican calendar.
About the Author
Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was born in Mexico City. He wrote many volumes of poetry, as well as a prolific body of remarkable works of nonfiction on subjects as varied as poetics, literary and art criticism, politics, culture, and Mexican history. He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1977, the Cervantes Prize in 1981, and the Neustadt Prize in 1982. He received the German Peace Prize for his political work, and finally, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.Eliot Weinberger (b. NYC, 1949), is an essayist and translator. He won PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos Award for promoting Hispanic literature in the US, and he is America's first literary writer to receive Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle. He lives in New York City.