Among French- and Spanish-readers, poet Huidobro (1893-1941) is
much more well-known and highly appreciated than he is here; many
feel that he represents the third side to a triangle of excellence
which also encompasses Neruda and Vallejo. An early emigre to
France from his native Chile, Huidobro, with Apollinaire and
Reverdy, founded the influential journal Nord-Sud, a cubist
bastion. But, because of a quarrelsome bent, Huidobro never stayed
in any one place or with any one circle for long: he ended his life
back in Chile, a bitter enemy of Neruda, although their poetries
and politics were in many ways complementary. Editor Guss opts for
Huidobro's very long poem Altazar as the masterwork: some of the
cantos translated here (in a generally praiseworthy bi-lingual
selection) are indeed quite striking, suggesting that the poem is,
in effect, a more political version of Apollinaire's "Zone"; and
its hortatory, aerial liveliness anticipates the coarser, bardic
works of vintage Allen Ginsberg. Still, it is Huidobro's early
European work of the Twenties that seems to hold up most
impressively. "Suspended from the sunset/ Among the clouds a bird
is burning/Day after day," Huidobro writes in the Spanish poem
"Arctic Seas." And the French poetry is especially well-translated
by Geoffrey Young and Michael Palmer: "The travellers arrived on a
steel wire/Perfectly balanced the way words arrive/Words cross the
universe at half-mast/And often get eaten by birds." In a Huidobro
manifesto which is included here, he asserts that "Each line of a
poem is the point of an angle that is closing, not the meeting of
an angle opening to every wind." And this precisionism mixes with a
strongly unfettered imagination of sequence and interval in these
memorable early poems. Overall: a valuable introduction to a poet
whose international importance deserves wider recognition. (Kirkus
Reviews)
This book is the only major collection of the great Chilean writer
Vicente Huidobro s poetry to appear in English. Drawn from his
works published from 1917 to 1948 and presented bilingually, the
translations are principally by David Guss supplemented with
renderings by Stephen Fredman, Carlos Hagen, W. S. Merwi, .
Geoffrey O Brien, David Ossman, Michael Palmer, Jerome Rothenberg,
Eliot Weinberger, and Geoffrey Young. Huidobro s masterpiece
Alrazor appears almost entire. Huidobro (1893-1948) left Santiago
for Paris in 1916. There he co-founded the influential Cubist
magazine Nord-Su with Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy. He
then launched his own poetic movement, Creationism, and wrote as
well for a score of avant-garde journals. Author of over forty
books plays. political tracts, novels, manifestos, poetry he worked
with Edgard Var se, Hans Arp, Robert Delauney, Jorge Luis Borges,
and other important writers. Besides his translations, editor Guss
has provided a biographical essay, Poetry ls a Heavenly Crime," a
lucid and helpful introductory overview of Huidobro and his work.
General
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