Piedra de Sol / Sunstone by Octavio Paz. Translated by Eliot Weinberger

 I've read this poem three times in the last four days. Reading, rereading, and rereading again seems the appropriate way to experience this book, which draws for its structure on the Aztec sun calendar and the cyclical notion of time it embodies.

I guess it qualifies as a long poem, though as it's only about 25 pages long, in each of the languages in which it is presented, one has to ask: Compared to what? I came across one scholar who likens it to "The Waste Land," and I can't help but suspect that it is that the poems are of similar length (Paz's offering is 150 lines longer) and the fact that their concerns are wide ranging, that drive that observation (Paz's poem is the more wide ranging). 

The styles in which the poems are written, for example, have little in common. Paz writes in regular hendecasyllabic eight-line stanzas; Eliot does not. The form Paz has chosen, and which Weinberger, wisely, does not slavishly follow in the English translation, gives the poem a driving rhythm that moves us around the circle that is the poem (the first six lines and the last six lines are identical), and also the shape of time.

    Oh life to live, life already lived,

    time that comes back in a swell of sea,

    time that recedes without turning its head,

    the past is not past, it is still passing by, 

    flowing silently into the next vanishing moment  . . . 

Time brings us around and around again, but in our lives we move, without deviation, straight to our end. This is one of the riddles Paz worries in "Sunstone."

     . . . there is no redemption, time can never

    turn back, the dead are forever 

    fixed in death and cannot die

    another death, they are untouchable, 

    frozen in a gesture, and from their solitude,

    from their death, they watch us,

    helpless, without ever watching,

    their death is not a statue of their life,

    and eternal being eternally nothing,

    every minute is eternally nothing, 

    a ghostly king rules over your heartbeat

    and your final expression, a hard mask

    is formed over your changing face:

    the monument that we are to a life,

    unlived and alien, barely ours . . . 

Another difference from "The Waste Land" is that in the end, Paz's vision is affirmative. Love, carnal and otherwise, will save us:

    to love is to battle, if two kiss

    the world changes, desires take flesh,

    thoughts take flesh, wings sprout

     . . . on the backs of the slave, the world is real

    and tangible, wine is wine, bread 

    regains its savor , water is water,

    to love is to battle, to open doors,

    to cease to be a ghost with a number

    forever in chains, forever condemned

    by a faceless master . . .

Reading this poem, one feels the liberation Paz writes about.

The quotations from Eliot Weinberger's translation should reveal that he, through different means, attains the rhythmic forward thrust we find in Paz's Spanish. "Sunstone," both in Spanish and in its English translation, is a pleasure to read, to reread, and to reread again.