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.
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"Huidobro's great poem is the most radical experiment in the modern era. It is an epic that tells the adventures, not of a hero, but of a poet in the changing skies of language. Throughout the seven cantos we see Altazor subject language to violent or erotic acts: mutilations and divisions, copulations and juxtapositions. The English translation of this poem that bristles with complexities is another epic feat, and its hero is Eliot Weinberger." (Octavio Paz )
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poetry for People Who Love Avant-Garde Latin American Poetry,
By Shattered Self (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Altazor (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Altazor is probably Vicente Huidobro's best poem. Who's Vicente Huidobro you ask? The least known of the top echelon of Latin American avant-garde (or "vanguardista" in Spanish) poets of the 20th century.
Impressive enough in Spanish, with its incredible wordplay and thought-provoking imagery, what's more impressive is Eliot Weinberger's translation. He's the only one who's ever published a translation of the entire thing (everyone else just translates excerpts); this is due to the incredible difficulty of translating some of the complicated linguistic games Huidobro plays with words, which Weinberger actually does a very good job of. Four star worthy if you can only read the translation; easily five star worthy if you can read both the original and the translation.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sublime translation of the most uplifting piece of poetry ever written.,
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This review is from: Altazor (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Are you prepare to fly upside-down and downside-up through an unexplored universe of words and electrifying feelings? This is your chance to get to see what is inside of the most amazing experimental work of Hispanic poetry ever created: Vicente Huidobro's imagination lifts us up and moves us through an indescribable adventure, that Eliot Weinberger has been able to translate stunningly in the language of the anglo-saxons. As a native-speaker of Spanish, a natural-born citizen of Chile and fan of Huidobro's poetry, I totally recommend this translation which is more than worth having!
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This review is from: Altazor (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)
if you are a fan of J Borges or O Paz you will be a fan of this Vicente s longest poem. Altazor retains a freshness that is surprising for a work almost 80 years old. As a contempory artist[collage] working in New Zealand I am able to add another tool to help pry open the sleeping eyes of my audiance.
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First Sentence:
Altazor por que perdiste tu primera serenidad? Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
mis modos, las olas, las estrellas, las nubes New!
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Altazor por que perdiste tu primera serenidad? Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
mis modos, las olas, las estrellas, las nubes New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 6
books:
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- Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges in Front Matter, and Back Matter
- Karmic Traces by Eliot Weinberger in Front Matter, and Back Matter
- The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry by Eliot Weinberger in Front Matter, and Back Matter
- Latin America: A Sociocultural Interpretation by Julius Rivera in Front Matter
- Collected Poems (Skoob Seriph) by George Eliot in Front Matter
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