Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Sunstone is the longest and perhaps the most extraordinary poem by the extraordinary poet Octavio Paz. Sunstone is an epic poem, long and passionate, like a golden mantle in which to take shelter. A hypnotic torrent of images and signs dazzle and enchant us as we pass through each verse. The imagination is left spinning, intoxicated with pleasure. Sunstone is made up of hendecasyllables because hendecasyllables are the measure of the sonnet, the love poem par excellence in Latin languages. And they are 584 hendecasyllables because the planet Venus covers a cycle of 584 days to return to the same point in relation to the sun. This peculiarity was highly valued and studied by the Aztecs, who placed it at the centre of their cosmogony. And of that portentous and complex machine for reading the cosmos, the Sunstone, the Aztec Calendar.

Let the music, the images and the many lights of the 584 lines of this prodigious love poem to life and its fragility carry you away.

Credits: Poem by Octavio Paz, Translation 1987, 1991 by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions Paperbook NDP735, ISBN 0-8112-1195-9, 1991) Read by Gabriel Porras, professional voice artist

Music: Horizon, by Josh Leake at artlist.io With our own atmosphere, by Kris Keogh, from his album Processed Harp Works, Vol. 1 at freemusicarchive.com