This selected edition presents an overview of all of Huidobro's work, from 1914 until 1948, when his final, posthumous volume was published. moving from the early symbolist work, though the high avant-garde phase towards the end of the First World War, then through the phase of Altazor and Temblor de cielo (Skyquake), the highpoint of his career (both published 1931), and on into the quieter late poetry which synthesises the previous work and settles down into a post-vanguard style. Also includes manifestos and interviews.

The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) is one of the most important figures in 20th-century Hispanic poetry and, with Cesar Vallejo, one of the pioneering avant-gardists in Spanish. Originally from an upper-class Santiago family, Huidobro was fortunate to have the means to support himself and his family while he found his artistic way. After an early phase writing in a quasi-symbolist style in his native city, he moved to Paris and threw himself into the local artistic milieu with a passion, quickly becoming a notable figure, publishing a large number of books in the period 1917-1925. Influenced initially by Apollinaire, Huidobro quickly befriended both forward-looking French writers such as Reverdy, Cocteau and Radiguet, and the Spanish expatriate artists, including Picasso and Juan Gris. He reached his poetic maturity in 1931 with the publication of two masterpieces: the long poem, Altazor, and the book-length prose-poem Temblor de cielo (Skyquake). Two further collections would follow during his lifetime, both published in Santiago in 1941. While he also published successful novels and plays, it is for his poetry that he is best remembered today. El ciudadano del olvido was published in Santiago in 1941, as one of a pair of volumes that summed up Huidobro's shorter poems from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. The two books show the author as a quieter figure, more mature, but somewhat ground down by misfortune - he had been forced by economic circumstances to return to Chile in the early 1930s, and was subsequently distressed by his lack of recognition in his homeland, by the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, by the fall of France in 1940, and by the collapse of his second marriage. The book contains some of his finest individual poems, less creationist than his previous efforts, and somewhat more surrealist than he would no doubt have cared to admit. The book and its companion, Ver y palpar (forthcoming in this series) are vital to an understanding of the range and complexity of Huidobro's poetic achievement.

Adam, published in 1916, is Huidobro's earliest mature work and his first attempt at free verse. While still full of rhetorical gestures from his previous symbolist (or modernista) style, heavily influenced by Ruben Dario, the book shows the author moving into very new territory, if at this stage not fully able to cast off his previous allegiances. It is fair to say that the book would today be forgotten, were it not for the author's spectacular later career, but it retains some interest as a transitional volume, albeit not as much as that demonstrated by El espejo de agua (The Water Mirror), also first published in 1916, but written after Adam. Adam is a young man's book, embarrassingly so at times, as the author proudly sets out his stall, but it represents a major leap forward. With his claim to Emersonian influence, his dismissal of traditional Hispanophone poetry in the Preface, and that typically outrageous tone-one we will meet many times in his later works, where he shouts from the rooftops, "Look at me!", and lays into his perceived enemies-it's hard to ignore the fact that Huidobro was all of 21 when he began this poem. The sins of youth, indeed.

In 1931, while on holiday in Arcachon, Huidobro and the Franco-German artist and writer, Hans (Jean) Arp together wrote Tres novelas exemplares (Three Exemplary Novels — no doubt a reference to the Exemplary Novels by Cervantes, to which of course they bear no resemblance at all), a set of wild quasi-surrealist "stories". In 1935, Huidobro — once again living in Chile — offered the set to a publisher in Santiago, but was told that the book was too short. Accordingly he wrote two further stories on his own, and the whole volume was titled Tres inmensas novelas. Which are therefore, not three, not huge and not novels. This volume offers all five stories in a bilingual format, and the cover is almost a copy of the one used in the first edition.

Cagliostro is a lurid tale of magic and secret societies during the reign of Luis XVI, centred on the figure of the Italian occultist Giuseppe Balsamo, known under his alias of Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. The book owes its style of presentation to the example of German expressionist cinema, of the kind exemplified by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. In the early 1920s, Vicente Huidobro-always fascinated by the new medium of film-wrote a film script on the subject of Cagliostro, in a treatment apparently very much in tune with the German expressionist cinema of the era. The film was apparently shot in 1923 by the Romanian director Mime Mizu but it was scrapped due to dissatisfaction over the editing. No trace of the film survives, although there are three pages from a script in the author's papers. A revised version of the script was submitted to The League for Better Motion Pictures in New York and won a $10,000 award as the best candidate for filming. Alas for the author, this was just at the point when the "talkies" arrived and this style of film-making was immediately rendered outmoded. However, the novella, which has many cinematic elements, was published in English translation in 1931 in both London and New York, to positive reviews. It appeared in the original Spanish only in 1934, in Santiago, Chile, where it had no impact at all. This edition reproduces the text of the 1931 translation. "[This book] is my answer to the question whether the cinematograph can influence the novel." (Vicente Huidobro)

Huidobro published Horizon carre in Paris in 1917), and quickly followed it with Tour Eiffel (in French and Spanish; Madrid, 1918), Hallali (in French; Madrid, 1918); Ecuatorial (in Spanish; Madrid, 1918), Poemas articos, likewise published in Spanish in Madrid, and El espejo de agua, a Spanish-language volume from 1916, reissued in Madrid in 1918. Horizon carre is heavily influenced by the work of Guillaume Apollinaire and marks Huidobro's definitive arrival on the avant-garde scene in Paris, even if-it has to be said-the volume is derivative. Huidobro's French was good even before he arrived in Paris: he had been educated well in Santiago, but this would not have prepared him for the linguistic and intellectual ferment he would find upon arrival in the main seat of the international avant-garde. Many of his early French-language manuscripts show signs of corrections by his friends at the time-the French poet, Pierre Reverdy and the Spanish artist, Picabia, both being among them.

The prose-poem Temblor de cielo is more apparently unified work than its companion, Altazor, although this might owe more to its style of delivery: an ecstatic outpouring of words that largely revolve around the themes of love, sex and death. The Isolde to whom much of the poem is addressed is an idealised feminine figure-part goddess, part idealised beloved, part Isolde from Wagner's opera (another ecstatic outpouring on the theme of love, sex and death) and part Ximena Amunategui, the young woman who had become the poet's second wife. I tend to think that the central impetus for the work is an erotic storm occasioned by the second Mrs Huidobro, notwithstanding the artistic fusion with the other elements mentioned above. The poem is also a sustained lyric effusion of a kind that Huidobro had never produced before, and it marks the point at which his work moves on from the barnstorming avant-garderie of his younger years to a more mature style, albeit one influenced by surrealism, a movement which Huidobro had previously attacked. It is also the last time that Huidobro was to adopt the god-like narrative persona that occurs in his earlier work. In Temblor, as in some earlier works, God is conflated with the poet-creator, as he is in Altazor, where the opening lines reflect the opening of a love-poem addressed to Ximena that the author published (to great scandal) in the Santiago newspaper, La Nacion: "Naci a los treinta y tres anos, el dia de la muerte de Cristo" [I was born at the age of thirty three, on the day Christ died]. (It should be noted that the author was 33 when he first met Ximena, which gives the imagery another dimension.)

In 1928, shortly after his marriage to Ximena Amunategui, and after meeting the actor Douglas Fairbanks, who expressed interest in the possibility of a new swashbuckler, Huidobro began writing his version of the Cid legend as a novel. The result is a highly readable, if slightly arch, version of the story, that casts aside the style of romantic 19th-century historical fiction in favour of more modern approaches and cinematic influences. Style aside, the book can be read a straightforward tale of adventure that sits happily alongside the 1961 epic movie that starred Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren and had thousands of extras. More than one line of the script for that movie sounds as if lifted from Huidobro's novel. The translation by Wells appeared quickly, under the title Portrait of a Paladin in 1931, in both London and New York, and this reprint offers the original version with only some minor edits, together with a new afterword and an extensive glossary to aid with figures, both legendary and genuine, from Old Spain.

Huidobro published Poemas articos in Madrid in 1918, this being the last of a rapid series of publications which established him as a major new talent both in French and in Spanish. Poemas articos is particularly interesting in that it shows the author taking on board lessons learned from Guillaume Apollinaire-an early friend in Paris-and probably also Pierre Reverdy, although this is something of an assumption, given that Reverdy repudiated his early work from this period and the poems that might have been an influence are no longer extant; the two poets also fell out, for reasons that are unclear. In any event, this is his longest Spanish-language volume up to this point, and marks a significant breakthrough. This edition also includes variant French versions.

Often compared with Apollinaire as the first and liveliest avant-garde poet in his language, Vicente Huidobro was a one-man movement ("Creationism") in the modernist swirl of Paris and Barcelona between the two World Wars. His masterpiece was the 1931 book-length epic Altazor, a Machine Age paean to flight that sends its hero (Altazor, the "antipoet") hurtling through Einsteinian space at light speed. Perhaps the fastest-reading long poem of the century, and certainly the wildest, Altazor rushes through the universe in a lyrical babble of bird-languages, rose-languages, puns, neologisms, and pages of identical rhymes, finally ending in the pure sound of the language of the future. Universally considered untranslatable until the appearance of Eliot Weinberger's celebrated version in 1988, Altazor appears again in an extensively revised translation with an expanded introduction.

In 1925, Huidobro published this collection of manifestos to consolidate his position in the avant-garde in the face of the burgeoning new Surrealist movement and also as a reaction to attacks from one Spanish critic in particular, a member of the Ultraist movement, who seemed to want to establish the Spanish avant-garde as an independent force, free of the influence of this loud, self-confident Chilean. The book appeared in the same year that he published his last two collections of French poetry, one of which demonstrated Dadaist influences, and the other Surrealist influences. 1925 is therefore a watershed year for Huidobro, one where he experimented with new approaches and also tried to shore up his prominent position as the artistic tides began to turn. Six years later, after some time back in Chile, and periods in Madrid, Paris and New York (where he had tried to get into the film world, and failed to do so because of the eruption of the talkies at a time when he was engaged in producing scripts for silent movies), Huidobro produced his two masterpieces, Altazor, written – the author claimed – between 1919 and 1930, and Temblor de cielo (Skyquake), written in 1928. The other work written at this time, i.e. between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s, was only to be collected in two volumes published in 1941, but it reinforces the impression given by the 1931 publications, that Huidobro had reached his maturity after the Parisian apprenticeship. The manifestos should be read with some seriousness, but perhaps also with a tongue in the cheek.

Before attaining his poetic maturity — and this would be through poems written mostly in Spanish — Huidobro wrote these two collections in French and published them in Paris in 1925, the same year that a volume of his manifestos appeared (see below). The two books have never been republished in France and have likewise not been published in Spanish translation other than in collected editions of the author’s works. While they are in some respects a developmental dead-end for Huidobro, they do demonstrate his attempts to engage, in one volume, with the influence of Dada, and, in the other, with the influence of Surrealism. His later work transcends these overt influences and moves onto new pastures, but these experiments were necessary in order to get him there. The complete texts of both first editions are included here along with all the (later) Spanish versions of the poems, made by the author himself, that have so far come to light.

Altazor y Temblor de cielo (1931), poemas en verso y prosa, respectivamente, son las abras clave del chileno Huidobro, uno de los importadores de las vanguardias a Espana. Altazor es una intensa abra metafisica, ademas de un ingenioso juego de palabras, culminacion del creacionismo.