Piedra de Sol
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 stops, only commas, 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: In this way, according to the analysis of the poem by José Emilio Pacheco, 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, and appeared as "Solsten" in the composite volume "Den våldsamma årstiden  (1960). It was followed by translations into French by Benjamin Péret (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. References. Eliot Weinberger, "The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987", Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1988.