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The name Sunstone is inspired by the 1957 poem "Piedra de Sol" written by the Nobel Prize winning writer Octavio Paz. A deep practice shares the qualities of this impassioned poem. and go on, bodiless, searching, in the dark.... testament of the sun, pomegranate, wheat-ear....
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Piedra de Sol ("Sunstone") is the poem written by Octavio Paz in 1957 that helped launch his international reputation.
- Octavio Paz, Pere Gimferrer
- 1957
Nov 17, 2022 · Sunstone, Eliot Weinberger’s 1991 translation of Octavio Paz’s Piedra de sol. by Philip W. Walsh, Ph.D., Lecturer, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and Liberal Studies. Octavio Paz (Mexico City, Mexico, 1914-1998) was a poet, essayist, diplomat, and editor.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Poem Summary
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
Sunstone, an epic poem (or lengthy narrative poem) by Mexican writer Octavio Paz, is Paz's most famous poetic work. Inspired by the Aztec reverence for the planet Venus, Paz wrote Sunstone to be 584 lines long, a structure that reflects Venus's 584-day synodic orbit—the amount of time it takes for the celestial object to return to its original posi...
Octavio Paz was born on March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico, to parents Octavio and Josefina. His father was an assistant to the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, tying the Paz family to the political and cultural elite of Mexico; however, they were also impoverished during Paz's childhood by these radical associations. As a teenager, Paz began pub...
Sunstone is an exploration of the meaning of existence. Humans are alone, lonely, but able to come together through love and community. Based on the Aztec reverence for the morning and evening star, the poem mimics the 584-day synodic cycle of Venus. A synodic cycle is the amount of time it takes for an object in the sky to return to the position i...
Unity
Paz explores the unity and disunity of humankind in his long poem Sunstone. The narrator of the poem seeks meaning for his existence and finds it in the visceral connection he feels with the land as well as in relationships between people. The connection he speaks of experiencing with other people is romantic love with women—women who have blended together in his mind to form a single radiant goddess. Near the beginning of the poem, this goddess is first manifest to him as a spirit of the lan...
Write a poem emulating Paz's style, with its rich imagery, surrealism, and references to history and mythology. Critique and edit your poems in small groups, and then present them to the class.Write a brief report about Venus, including a description of where Venus currently is in its sidereal—or star-relative—and synodic orbits. What would this current positioning mean to the Aztecs, wh...Paz was influenced by the French surrealists during his various stays in France from the 1940s through the 1960s. Research the history of French surrealism, choosing one or two authors to focus on....Paz was frequently more popular with North American readers for his essays than for his poetry, with his most famous book of essays being The Labyrinth of Solitude. Divide the essays among your cla...Motif of Fire
A motif is a unifying idea representing a theme that appears repeatedly throughout a story or poem. Motif is similar to theme but distinct because motif is specifically tied to an image or idea. Paz generously employs nature imagery throughout Sunstone, which ties the natural world and its processes and elements (trees, fire, water) to Paz's themes of unity and isolation. One of Paz's prominent motifs in this poem is fire. Paz uses fire imagery sparingly but with purpose, with references conc...
Hendecasyllable Lines
Paz composed Sunstone as 584 hendecasyllable, or eleven-syllable, lines. His use of hendecasyllable lines was a conscious, classical poetic choice. Hendecasyllable lines constitute a common meter in Italian and Spanish poetry and are often associated with sonnets, the preferred form for love poems. Hendecasyllable lines were popularized in Spanish poetry by the sixteenth-century poet and Renaissance man Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote his sonnets with such lines. Paz's choice of the hendecasy...
Mexico in the 1950s
Mexico in the 1950s was under the rule of liberal presidents belonging to the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Miguel Alemán Valdés, president of Mexico from 1946 to 1952, formed strong alliances with big businesses and brought about the development of highways, railroads, schools, and farms. Alemán's administration, however, was known for its corruption. His successor, Adolfo Ruiz Contines, by contrast, is considered to have been one of Mexico's most honest presidents. He focused his atten...
Aztec Calendar
Paz drew on his ancestral Aztec background in composing Sunstone. The Aztecs were very concerned with balance between their quarrelsome gods and kept a ritual calendar called the tonalpohualli to make sure all gods were appeased in their turn. The ritual calendar consists of a 260-day cycle made up of 20 weeks of 13 days each. There are 20 different day-signs, each associated with a different god. It thus takes 260 days to get through every combination of the 20 day-signs and the numbers 1 th...
1950s: Much of Latin America experiences an economic upturn and a resurgent interest in the arts. Popular authors of this decade include the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, the Mexican noveli...1950s: The United States, Soviet Union, and other industrialized nations rush to build nuclear weapons. It is the beginning of the "Atomic Age," when people first envision the possibility that huma...1950s: "All Summer in a Day," by Ray Bradbury, is a famous short story published in 1954 about a colony on Venus with lush vegetation. In the colony, it rains constantly, and the sun only appears f...Octavio Paz was an established and successful poet in the Spanish-speaking world by the time the first major English translation of his work was published in 1964. In a New York Times Book Review critique of the Selected Poems of Octavio Paz, the critic Dudley Fitts expresses elation that Paz's work has finally been made available to American audie...
Carol Ullmann
Ullmann is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she examines the motif of transformation in Paz's epic poem Sunstone, arguing that the motif is found not only in the message of the poem's content but also in the poem's structure, inspiration, and place in the canon of Paz's work. Octavio Paz's Sunstone is a poem concerned with transformation—a complete change in appearance or form. Transformation is a motif, or dominant idea, threaded throughout the epic poem, constituting p...
Oct 8, 2014 · This landmark bilingual edition gathers all the poetry the 1990 Nobel Laureate has published in book form since 1957, the year his long poem Sunstone, here translated anew, made its first appearance.
Dive into the poetic universe of Octavio Paz's Sunstone. This guide explores the structure, themes, and literary devices employed by Paz to create a mesmerizing poetic experience. Perfect for students and poetry enthusiasts.
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Mar 9, 2021 · Octavio Paz’s Sunstone is a poem concerned with transformation—a complete change in appearance or form. Transformation is a motif, or dominant idea, threaded throughout the epic poem, constituting part of the poem’s cyclical structure, its inspiration from Aztec sources, its theme, its content, and its historical context.
