Piedra de Sol

"Piedra de Sol" ("Sunstone") is a poem by Octavio Paz, written in 1957. It was praised as a "magnificent" example of surrealist poetry in the presentation speech of his Nobel Prize. It 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 corresponding to this 584-day period. The first six lines of the poem are repeated again at the end of the poem.

A translation into English by Eliot Weinberger was published in 1987 as part of the collection The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987. In 1991 this translation was joined with the original poem in a single volume published by New Directions Books (New York). This edition also featured illustrations of the Aztec calendar taken from Mariano Fernandez de Echeverria y Veytia's Los calendrios mexicanos, completed in 1782 and published posthumously in 1836.