![]() ![]() When Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, the Swedish Academy declared Sunstone to be "one of the high points of Paz's poetry." Originally published as a stand-alone piece titled Piedra de sol in Spanish in 1957, Sunstone was first translated into English by the bilingual poet Muriel Rukeyser and published in 1962. Humans must find salvation within each other, the poem concludes. The gods, distinctly Aztec in their bloodthirsty characterization, are omnipresent but, as the narrator of the poem learns, do not give human beings salvation. In the poem, Paz writes about his loneliness, seeks understanding of human existence, and discovers solace and companionship in loving other people. The title also evokes the famous Aztec sacrificial altar stone recovered in Mexico City in the eighteenth century. 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 position relative to the sun. Sunstone, an epic poem (or lengthy narrative poem) by Mexican writer Octavio Paz, is Paz's most famous poetic work.
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