Altazor

By Vicente Huidobro

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0819566780
• ISBN13: 9780819566782
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 8.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up

Customer Reviews

the best

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.

Poetry for People Who Love Avant-Garde Latin American Poetry

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.