The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz
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The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz is a landmark bilingual gathering of all the poetry he has published in book form since 1952, the year of his premier long poem, Sunstone (Piedra de Sol)―here translated anew by Eliot Weinberger―made its appearance.
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About this book
This bilingual edition gathers all of Octavio Paz's poetry published in book form from 1952 onward. Paz, born in Mexico City in 1914, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, and this collection presents his Spanish originals alongside English translations. The volume opens a wide view of a writing life that stretched across decades and continents, with Paz spending significant periods in France, India, and the United States while remaining rooted in Mexican literary culture.
A central work in the collection is Sunstone, known in Spanish as Piedra de Sol, Paz's first major long poem. The English version here is a new translation by Eliot Weinberger, who served as the volume's principal translator and had a long working relationship with Paz. Sunstone draws on Aztec calendrical imagery and cycles of time, folding personal memory and myth into a single extended sequence.
Beyond Sunstone, the book traces Paz's evolving concerns across shorter poems and later sequences. His writing often moves between observation of the physical world and meditation on language itself, exploring how words both reveal and obscure what they describe. The bilingual format allows readers to follow these shifts in both languages on facing pages.
