Customer Reviews

Altazor (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
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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.

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!

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.