Vicente Huidobro, Altazor, Trans. by Eliot Weinberger, Wesleyan University Press, 2003 [1931.].“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.”
"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."
“In this book-length poem, appearing here in Spanish and English, bursts of pure musical sound alternate with concrete, incisive observations to describe the existential dread and mystery of the human condition. Weinberger's translation from the Spanish of the esteemed Chilean poet Huidobro's (1893-1948) seven-canto epic establishes its own rhythm and velocity; words and ideas whirl and dance, masterfully choreographed.The anti-poet Altazor (which means high hawk) is the volatile hero whose rage is calmed by melody. During his flight through life he philosophizes, fantasizes, grunts, singswildly and exquisitely. The cantos are discrete in focus and pulse and length and shape yet all rise to a crescendo and reverberate similarly, and are essential to the whole. The interior monologue-fantasy-stream of consciousness form is, at times, exhaustivethis is a soaring to all destinations and no destination. "Earth and its sky/ Sky and its earth/ Forest night/ And river day through the universe/ The bird tralalee sings in the branches of my brain/ For I've found the key to the infiniternity/ Round as the unimos and the cosverse/ Oooheeoo ooheeoohee.'' Altazor's adventure, like life, is unpredictable, dangerous, uncensored and urgent, and Weinberger is faithful to Huidobro's untamable spirit. This poem marks the inauguration of Graywolf's Palabra Sur series.” - Publishers Weekly
“Inaugurating Graywolf's “Palabra Sur” (Words from the South) series, Altazor is a radical experiment by a Chilean poet (1893-1948) linked with Vallejo and Neruda as the founders of modern Spanish American poetry. Full of the optimism and energy of the post-World War I era, it uses as its central metaphor the anti-poet's fall through space at the speed of light as he searches for a new poetic idiom: "I want to bring you a music of the spirit/… that… explodes in festival lights inside your dream.'' Indeed, the remainder explodes language, turns it inside out through syntactical ellipses, long, chant-like rhymes, punsuntil meaning is pure language of sound. For all foreign poetry collections.” - Robert Hudzik
“All languages are dead”: A startling statement for a poet to make about the tool of his trade. For Vicente Huidobro, language was dead. The book-length epic poem Altazor was written between 1919 and 1931, right as Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall with the devastation of World War I. The King’s Men were optimistically trying to put him together again; the poets, the artists, the scientists attempted to create something within the space left by the destruction. Art may have been corrupted by the propaganda of the war to end all wars, but this was a chance to make language anew. Poetry needed to be about execution, not just a “lady harp of beautiful images.”
Altazor refuses to simply represent a distilled version of life. The modern age had arrived –- the age of radios, bridges, skyscrapers. The vehicle of this new age was the aeroplane. The unsung hero of this epic is Charles Lindbergh, who flew non-stop across the across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and proved that anything is possible. Thus our protagonist Altazor, the Anti-Poet, echoes his journey, only he flies away from the earth entirely, gaining speed, the rhythm of words cascading perpetually faster. In this emptiness of space, he has the liberty to “revive the language/ With raucous laughter/ With wagons of cackles/Witch circuit breakers in sentences.” When he reaches the Einsteinian boundary of language, his words turn from poetry to energy.
In Altazor’s world, language acts. A “brutal painful grammar” massacres the old “internal concepts.” Words are not mere representations but the things themselves. There are words that have the “shades of trees," words with “the atmosphere of stars,” words that “ignite,” words that “freeze the tongue.”
What happened to the language? Why, asks the reader, did it die? Too many “stellar words” and “cherries of vagabond goodbyes.” Now, says Huidobro, we are “looking for something else." Let us play the “simple sport of words” with pure words and nothing more, “no images awash with jewels.”
Our hero Altazor flies further from the earth, further from Latin Homeric poetry tradition, closer to the pure pleasure of sound. Sentences romp and play, nouns masquerade as verbs, prepositional phrases hijack sentences, but the meaning and power behind the words remains constant:
'The waterfall tresses over the night
While the night beds to rest
With its moon that pillows the sky
I iris the sleepy land
That roads towards the horizon
In the shade of a shipwrecking tree'
By interchanging associated words, Huidobro keeps the connotation behind the phrase while infusing new life into old themes.
With Altazor, Vincente Huidobro releases poetry from the chains of nostalgia and sets “fire” to a “shivering language." Translator Eliot Weinburger maintains Huidobro’s playful game of words, resulting in a forceful and timeless epic.” – Laura Felch
“Perhaps surprisingly, Vicente Huidobro and Ron Silliman are connected. What connection can Language have with the literal embodiment of creacionismo prior to WWII? The inescapable influence of both poets for the avant–garde in their respective milieus is considerable, achieved with intrepid facilitation & delicacy, an influence founded on experiment, risk and prodigious production. Both changed the language. Huidobro and Silliman were fascinated with the limits of language and emphasized the integral role of the eye in their poetry. Looking points the way to their development and choices. Each poet relentlessly asks, what do we see, why is it important, and how is this examined? Can what we see be represented in language? What would be necessary in order to do so? Will new methods be required? Assuredly. To trace looking in Silliman and Huidobro, comparing the Alphabet and Altazor, or A, voyage in a parachute could occupy years, but a few draughts are here hazarded.
Before cracking the spine, notice both titles use non–standard capitalization to emphasize the A. Huidobro includes Z in the nomenclature. Allusions are made to Zarathustra within Altazor, and can this be surprising from a poet who believes god must be created (in order to exist at all)? Silliman crafts the Alphabet, nearly a life’s work, in the abecedarian. the Alphabet is comprised of 26 books with titles from A to Z, ranging from the very short to the relatively long, the entire project weighing in at 1062 pages from Albany to Zyxt. It is not hard to immediately recognize that both have an abiding interest in concrete and vispo, which applies to language by way of the alphabet. This is one entry point to consideration of the eye and how it deciphers the world.
Huidobro and Silliman both have an interest in the physicality of text. Although visual design may not be a primary element, their work is informed by it, for example, by an association with Geoff Huth for Silliman, and Apollinaire for Huidobro. José Quiroga mentions the “early calligrammes” of Huidobro where “words and text are concrete objects.” Silliman’s choice of Huth’s work for the cover of the Alphabet is not coincidental. Daniel Balderston confirms that although Huidobro “did not proceed much beyond Apollinaire in his use of visual elements in poetry … [he] once exhibited versions of his poems written in several colors of ink in an art gallery.” Later exposition of the technical and strategic variations within Silliman’s work will be an aid to show that he is very interested in visual concerns and how to challenge and explore what they eye perceives.
“Eye” appears 25 times on two pages of Altazor (83, 85). That is, if you don’t count iris, see, retinas, etc. This does not appear to be accidental language play, although it is ecstatic. Eye mirrors the “ai” in the preverbal end of the last Canto. Also perhaps the I — does this translate — the vowels certainly do, the actual sounds: ojo, eye, I, ai — are vowel full. It is hard to overemphasize how crucial and in the variety of ways eye is used:
maddened eye (55)
The fire that burns my inner coals and the alcohol of my eyes (33)
The sun rises in my right eye and sets in my left (35)
Huidobro places creation into an inverted religion that creates god, and does so with vision, vision that must depart, must move in and around what’s real and spill it out. There is no one else who could or would have done it, or at least it might be safe to believe Huidobro would not disagree.
Silliman dwells in joy and diversion, the escape into and out of the tension between image, eye and world, inner and outer. Description and still life are his continual renewal.
Language is... / polis is... eyes (the Alphabet 979)
gasping and blinking the water from their eyes (978)
Silliman asks, or I do reading the Alphabet: poetry of image? How many kinds could there be? Is this infinite interiority, or the swirling basis that is or may be thought; is image cosmos, Meta, or under layer? Do we see science of logic or philosophy or love? Any of these may or may not be linguistic, & if they convey image, void flutters into or out of our way. Huidobro reaches into his bag of tricks to speak to Silliman more than half a century later: “All is fickle in plain sight” (Altazor 113).
A voice that brings sight to the attentive blind
The blind hidden in the basements of houses
As if at the bottom of their selves (49)
Then, “the sailboat that sets out” keeps the motion going the rapid continuation of misdirection, not in the sense of going elsewhere, but reformulation, transformation “transformed into birds,” visualization, and imagery. The exposition of linguistic exploration into the heights, into what we can see, into what we can figure — “Everything turns into an omen.”
The exaltation of dragging the heavens down to the tongue (all 49)
This procedure ties mysteriously to a still life backbone. We may find some variations on the effects of description, in the technique, in the basis of the visual as such, but the departures are as eloquent as the eyes.
This seems an interesting point to transition to the inevitable verbal exploits of these visually, weirdly obsessed artists of language.
Here begins the unexplored territory
Round on account of the eyes that behold it (Altazor 101)
We find with Huidobro in Canto III, long sequences of verbal play, a fine example of which concludes with an “etc.” — after continuing for roughly a page. A traditional poet might continue with the sequential technique of identifiable pattern for a couple lines then cleverly look away and return for balance with an echo later (like an abstract painter working with a dominant shape might put a little hint elsewhere in the composition). This is soup–can–upon–soup–can. A bold announcement announces the creation and the creator. Huidobro seems to ask, “Who else could do this beautifully?” Here is the pattern: Verb–nounA–like–nounB, Verb–nounB–like–nounC, Verb–nounC–like–nounD:
Play a heliotrope like music
Empty music like a sack
Decapitate a sack like a penguin
Cultivate penguins like vineyards… (71)
Huidobro explores verse with couplets, prose, free verse, preverbal clamor, song, myriad formal experiments, pages of exemplification & derivation of kind of mills (190 or so sequentially), long flowing stanzas of falling, flying, swimming, loving, delving, and battling. Canto III displays a general tightening of form beginning with couplets, physically near the middle of the work, after language has had his way with him and vice versa. Canto III is a shorter Canto.
For everything is as it is in every eye
Glances will be rivers (69)
I get tired (almost) of all the eye references. But a sequence like this wakes all but the most somnolent.
When I light a cigarette
What happens to the other cigarettes that came on the boat? (83)
All of this play in Canto III binds to Silliman, who thrives on audacity, with perpetuation of what would be dropped, long after anyone in his right mind would have let it go. The continual inventiveness of staying with it, the shot that doesn’t cut, the long take — if say for an hour in poetry time in terms of Huidobro, more like 24 hours for Silliman. Didn’t Warhol leave a shot of the Empire State Building that ran for 8 hours straight, which of course leads one to think of Monet’s experiments with light, which leads to other things, what it leads to is surely different (deferent) for every reader — this is how they tie, the beginning of how they tie together, Silliman and Huidobro.
This may perhaps be said of both, but certainly, one valid way to read Silliman is @ random. By way of exposition, here’s a chunk:
blank slate of drive–in screen
collapsing
in dry weedy field
tiny flags on hill
simulate poppies
as possible art piece
offshore, by context
hidden in the head (496)
The section is composed of somewhat traditional non–punctuated stanzas with the possible exception of indentation (to open up white space), piled up visual observation, with non–connecting visual fragmentation that doesn’t cohere (ever), a smooth even, discrete comprehensible accumulation, that is contrapuntal by way of different “types” of statements. A flow certainly, but not one that adds. Please note: each part is not inaccessible. The double negative serves because Silliman can, like all experimentalists, be a little unsettling at first, until one can sit down, perhaps over time, and give the work a real chance. Then, the Alphabet becomes surprisingly reachable.
any rhythm defi(n)es sentiment
when will this pen
come to life
transit’s glory is another story
false
white sun shimmers in the solid sky (497)
How can such avant–garde work be so grounded, accessible and demanding all at once? It looks around and sticks to its guns formally, but is not so critically difficult as to loop out of intelligibility. Is this also creacionismo? Language coming to life must needs doing so as language? It would be interesting to compare the natural world of the two.
The multiple meanings of words are at play, accidents of sound, accidents of letters colliding, in the eye ?
“defi(n)es”
Also surrealism — the juxtaposition:
under that flesh / the one with the jolly center (498)
Imagine — a script adaptation! Could it be watched sequentially, doubtful… more like a music video channel, come back to it on the commercial, see if it’s something you like, stick with it until the microwave bleeps. The text is so slowly panoramic the effect verges on static, “gasping and blinking the water from their eyes” (978).
For formal variation take a quick flip through the Alphabet. Find lines with no stanza breaks, free stanzas, formally rigid stanzas (in sets of 12 lines), prose with no breaks, paragraphs in sentences of 12, couplets, poetry of looking at the sky and describing it, poetry of looking at the ground and describing it, bolded words perhaps meant to be read as separate poems within the poems that contain them, but a remarkable commonality — the sensibility of the sentence holds together.
For Huidobro it is the line.
All the languages are dead
We must revive the languages…
with circuit breakers in the sentences (75)
No punctuation, signified & signifier seems to have their own wild life, “Astral gymnastics for the numb tongues.” How does Huidobro zor, or soar, Altazor perhaps translating as high, or soaring, hawk? Translation is interesting, Huidobro seems to say; we play formally. What could be more worthwhile: “And cataclysm in the grammar” (75). Also how do the interior drifts invite the reader to play and still surprise & depart to disjointed associations?
Huidobro’s LINE: each is more or less complete, very little enjambment; tight structure makes punctuation superfluous except where needed for meaning. Are these breaths? Into surrealism — liberation of words to wherever they sound best, who knows exactly why.
Burst in the mouth of motorcycle diamonds
In the drunkenness of its fireflies (75)
For Huidobro, research and randomness informed by verbal play “from sign to sign” with anaphora “The tomb opens:”
The tomb opens and in its depths we see a line of icebergs
That sparkle in the searchlights of the storm…
The tomb opens and in its depths we see the bubbling nebula blinking on and off…
The tomb opens and a bouquet of flowers in a hairshirt leaps out (111)
Huidobro is looking, and looking into, more Romantic than Silliman. But he holds with Romanticism that skews to fusion of the vanguard movements of the early 20th century (Dunshee). It is not hard to notice verticalism, surrealism, collage, and cubism. Silliman and Huidobro both oddly juxtapose — linguistic, personal, and confrontational. They explode & expose what they touch, what they see.
Ana Pizarro paraphrases an early manifesto of Huidobro:
a) We must break with the “poetry of reproduction” of nature …
b) to create an independent work that has a distinctive architecture.
“And since we must not kill ourselves (Altazor 75),” what then? This has been thought through: “The simple sport of words (75).” Is this A. or H.? Is this explanation or continuation? Do we read it as detective or hedonist? Do these little asides bring us back in?
Total severance of voice and flesh at last (76)
Silliman recommends What ( the W of the Alphabet) as a place to start reading his work:
… Politics
of the lyric, absent
individual, absent voice.
Shadow of a gull passes
over the green stucco wall. (764)
Notice punctuated short lines carried by the sentence, which carries itself:
A crow large as a gull
glides to its landing
at the center of
the apartment complex lot. (764)
Who is being spoken to? The eye? The I? The you? What is between the I and the you? Who doesn’t see the effect this sentence creates? Who hasn’t felt it? But then who writes this (kind of thing) down? What narrative is being carried? How does it loop back and connect? Is there any syllogistic structure, any arc possible in discrete, observant statements? If no, what does this imply? Certainly, the method is formal; “A short line / makes for anxious music. Not breath / but civilization.” or “We’re just in it for the honey.” “At each transfer point, glimpse how lives / weave past. A woman with an interesting book / in her purse which I pretend not to see.” (747)
Sentence after sentence after sentence without a single stanza break through the whole length of What. The sentences carry from 749 to 860, again, as a single left–justified stanza. The lines vary in length, some as short as two letters, and there are two indentations, which does vary the white space, so that is like: clouds rolling, or perhaps days, the aging process? I am not sure I would ever sit down and read it through, but who knows? A more extreme example by far would be Day by Kenneth Goldsmith (and others), so perhaps this would be light in comparison. However, the joy of the Alphabet, taking it as it is, opening it up where the page falls, is exquisite.
Or, as my distilled reading of Canto IV in Altazor replies to Silliman on our behalf, “What is this but language?” “scooping”, “souping”, “seeping”, “sleeping”, “swoop” & “wallow” (& variations on), “horizon”, “monochronic”, word blur, neologism, appropriation of (its) sounds to form others that cohere, dazzle, drift and envelope through timing, rhythm, “swallowing (89)” — Huidobro & Silliman answer each other, they riff, they have a nice dialogue and agree to meet again later but never do.
“Cosmically outrageous… greet me Bees rats… Rivers and forests ask me / What’s new how are you?” “It will be through my voice that they speak to man” “Lord god if you exist you owe it all to me”
Poet
Antipoet (35)
The seismographs register my passage through the world (33) *
* See later work by Raúl Zurita which is literally poetry on seismographs. The emphasis on the jagged visual seems to stretch between the heights that Altazor drifts from very aptly.
If one were to launch a paper on Silliman, his influence is so widespread as to be hard to describe:
blog + Language + American Tree + sentence + the Alphabet + readings + spokesperson
Intimidating, but also inviting. Perhaps best in little doses over time. Tone: formal analytical experimental thoughtful funny. How is he funny? This what ties all to any, a way in, also a way out.
Let’s not think too hard about this. Weave in and out a few pages where it counts and structure holds. Does every sentence have its own turn? Silliman uses a mechanical term, torque. That works. Not even a before and after or exterior but built in. Yet the placements are propitious. Don’t get so serious.
Huidobro is the only extant poet of creacionismo — trilingual — connected — rambunctious. Perhaps the relative lack of influence in America speaks more harshly of us than it does of him. I wonder if he would have cared.
Each writer has the feasibility of opening @ any point, like a video running in an art museum, interesting, beautiful, and rarely does one have the slightest intention of “finishing.” Does finishing really seem plausible in these works? The overall artistic “aim” seems to be incapable of fulfillment (at least linguistically, in the sense that quest, experiment, innovation, seeks an unknown form from a formal place), at least to state: this isn’t a detriment. Join me here for a while, the work says. Literally flip around. Doesn’t the eye do this with an inverted image on the retina? For each poet, why string these observations in this way? I wouldn’t counsel answering the question right away. Huidobro has beauty of thought and association through language, a master who forgot the rules but is kind enough to mention a few in passing and is human enough to hang onto those he can’t let go of and doesn’t want to.
For one last tribute to the connection between these two immanent figures, Eliot Weinberger, Altazor’s translator, gets explicit mention in the Alphabet:
if only Eliot Weinberger
had married Carl Andre
How do you say “asshole” in Dutch? (348)” – Jason Harmon
Vicente Huidobro, The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro, Trans.by Stephen Fredman, Carlos Hagan, W. S. Merwin, New Directions Publishing, 1981.“This is the first major collection of the great Chilean writer's work to appear in English. Huidobro is considered one of the most significant poets of our century and is recognized as one of the seminal figures in modern Spanish-language poetry.”
Read it at books.google
Vicente Huidobro, Manifest/Manifestos, Trans. by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, Green Integer Books, 1999.“One of the great poets of the 20th Century, Vicente Huidobro was born in Chile in 1893. As a youth he traveled to Paris where he lived for many years, befriending both French and Spanish poets such a Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Juan Larrea and Jorge Luis Borges. His manifestos, which crystallized his poetics of Creationism, were published in French in 1925, the year in which he returned to Chile to become the editor of a newspaper. During this period he ran for the presidency of Chile, but was defeated, after which he returned to Paris, where he wrote novels and, in 1931, the poetic work Altazor.
Manifestos Manifest contains autobiographical reassessments of his writing, such as "Manifestos Manifest" and "Creationism", more typically manifesto-like statements such as "Futurism and Machinism" and "Manifestos Mayhaps," and comically inspired poetic prose pieces such as "The Poetry of the Poet." Through all these one cannot but hear the voice of this great poet, declaiming, exploring, proselytizing, remembering, and discovering.”
From "The Need for a Poetic Aesthetic Made by Poets":
"In the same way that the laws of chemistry must be constituted by chemists, and that those of astronomy or of physiology must be delineated by astronomers or by physiologists, the laws of poetry are never correct, except when elaborated by poets.
Philosophers or physicians who talk about poetry do so at the risk of understanding nothing and muddling everything. They speak from outside a thing which must be gotten inside of, in order to be fully explored and apprehended.
This is what the examples cited by those gentlemen on the outside looking in at poetry bring home so clearly. In all the sciences, there are the men of the laboratory, those who truly can be accounted insiders and the vulgarizers who are generally more renowned and who, being more facile, enjoy the greatest popularity. Who are the poets cited in essays on poetry written by persons on the outside? They are the poets who hold no significance for real poets. In point of fact, all the theories upheld by these examples slump and fall flat."
From Huidobro's "The Seven Oaths of the Poet" [with Ouroboros ending]:
"My God, My God, why have you forsaken me...
Alone amidst the wolves. And I am the cascade of dreams where the wolves drink their fill.
Alone amidst the four cardinal points furiously battered by the hurricane of the planets.
They have abandoned me here in the middle of a river which tilts on its axis, which runs in circles, bending back upon itself like a warped wheel or a snake which bites its own bewitched tail."
“Painters and writers show up on every page of Manifestos Manifest. Huidobro seems to have known everyone in Paris in the teens and twenties. His love-hate relationship with the Surrealists (he was friends with many of them but refers to the movement itself as "the violin of psychology") makes for fascinating reading -- just keep in mind that these are manifestos for his own aesthetic theory, Creationism. Sometimes it seems like Huidobro could have been Breton's henchman: Cocteau, "a writer without merit," out, right now! Soupault, boring, out! But then, Éluard, you're too good to be a Surrealist, out!
Huidobro has some interesting ideas on why Creationist poems are "universally translatable." The wikipedia page sums up these ideas, which can be found in Manifestos Manifest in the text "Creationism": "The poet also claims that creationist poetry is by its own nature universal and universally translatable, 'since the new facts remain identical in all tongues,' while the other elements that prevail in non-creationist poetry, such as the rhyme and music of the words, vary among languages and cannot be easily translated, thus causing the poem to lose part of its essence."
I also like the quotes and anecdotes Huidobro gives throughout the book:
From Ben Johnson's Volpone, or the Fox: "Your very bathwater shall be made of essence of cloves, spirits of roses and violets, unicorn's milk, and panther's breath preserved and mixed with Cretan wine. We shall drink gold and amber until the spinning ceiling gives us vertigo." [Huidobro then tells us, "I will never forget the gestures of admiration and the exclamations of Apollinaire after I showed him, one evening while I was dining with him during the war, these admirable pages of Ben Johnson, the English playwright who exerted such a great influence over Shakespeare."]
Cicero: "In order to make beautiful verse, a state of madness must first exist."
Desnos: "In the dream of Rrose Selavy, there is a dwarf crawling out of a well eating his bread, the night." [Huidobro says he likes this very much, "despite the fact that Rrose Selavy makes me squirm a bit."]
Éluard: "Night straggled in with the swallows. Owls divided up the sun and weighted it to the earth."
Three images from Gerardo Diego, a Spanish poet: "Your head splutters as it deflates," "The rain trembles like a lamb," and "A dove comes unglued from the sky." [Huidobro calls Diego a "Creationist" poet, but Diego is associated with the Ultraists. Huidobro even says about Diego and Juan Larrea, "They have never hoaxed (unlike those wretched Ultraists) or disappointed people of superior spirit." I don't know enough about the movements to untangle this.]
Rabelais, Pantagruel speaking: "In consideration of the horripilation of the bat declining bravely the summer solstice to flirt with flibbertigibbets who have gone the pawns one better, by means of the evil vexations of the lucifuges nycticoraces who are subject to the Roman climate, and of a monkey mounted on horseback bending a crossbow with his reins, there is every reason to ask why the good woman, with one foot naked and the other one shod, blew up the galleon, which then had to be patched, and merited reimbursement, in the primmest and ugliest frame of conscience, of as many trinkets as there are hairs on the backs of eighteen cows, and an equal amount for the embroiderer. In like manner, he is declared innocent in the special case of the rancid runts, in which it was thought he was implicated, since he could not crap happily, due to the decision of a pair of perfumed gloves, by the crackling of a walnut candle, as is customary in his homeland of Myrbalay, while releasing a bowstring laden with bronze cannonballs from which the cooks' lackeys disputatiously pattycake their moldy vegetables from the mousepatch to the ringing of the sparrowhawk bells sewn with Hungarian needlework that his brother-in-law carried memorably in an adjacent basket stitched with three chevrons made from rattan, to the kennel on the corner where one tugs the worm-eaten parakeet by its feather."
Huidobro repeatedly praises the obscure Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux (1861 - 1940). Click on that link to be taken to the Atlas Press page for Pauses in the Procession -- somehow copies are still available. Also see the wikipedia entry and French blog dedicated to him. Huidobro prefaces the below passage by Saint-Pol-Roux, "This admirable man had already said, in 1913, some things which it gives me the greatest joy to transcribe here":
Geometer of the absolute, art now goes about founding nations, nations which exist as a unique memory at the base of the traditional universe, nations surveyed and mapped out in the minds of those mystic scribes, the poets; nations where time shall be marked by the beats of the poet's heart, where steam shall be made from his breath, where the tempests and the springtimes shall be his own joys and sorrows, where the atmosphere shall vary with the flux of his fluids, where the waves shall express his emotion, where seismic energy shall echo the flex of his muscles, and from these subjugated forces shall arise nations, and the poet, in sympathetic pangs of birth, shall furnish them with a spontaneous population, flushed from the quadrants of his personality.
While science prudently contends that it will have nothing to do with miracles, poetry suddenly declares itself the science of sciences, wholly sufficient unto itself, subject to capricious rules, which differ from poet to poet, but which rally together under a primordial law: the law of the gods.” - ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com
Vincente Huidobro, The Poet is a Little God: Creationist Verse, Trans.by Jorge García-Gómez, Xenos Books, 1996."En face edition includes poems from El espejo de agua (1916), the entire collection of Poemas árticos, and the extended poem Ecuatorial (both 1918). Informative, if tendentious, introductory essay by Kern; short selected bibliography. Rather literal translations are accurate, not inspired"
Excerpts from 'The Poet Is A Little God'
Ars Poetica
Let the verse be as a key
Opening a thousand doors.
A leaf falls; something is flying by;
Let whatever your eyes gaze upon be created,
And the soul of the hearer remain shivering.
Invent new worlds and watch over your word;
The adjective, when not a life-giver, kills.
We are in the cycle of nerves.
Like a memory
The muscle hangs in the museums;
Nevertheless, we have no less strength:
True vigor
Dwells in the head.
Why do you sing the rose, oh Poets!
Make it blossom in the poem;
Only for us
Live all things under the Sun.
The Poet is a little God.
The Water Mirror
My mirror, a current in the nights,
Becomes a brook and leaves my room.
My mirror, deeper than the orb
Where all the swans have drowned.
It is a green pool in the rampart
Your fixed nakedness sleeps in its midst.
Over its waves, beneath somnambulant skies,
My dreams draw away as ships.
Standing astern you will always see me singing.
A secret rose is swelling in my breast
And a drunken nightingale flutters on my finger.
Non Serviam
One fine morning, after a night of beautiful dreams and exquisite nightmares, the poet got up and shouted at Mother Nature: Non serviam. With the full force of his lungs, an echo, both translator and optimist, repeated in the distance: "I will not serve you." Mother Nature was about to remonstrate with the young rebel poet when he, whipping off his sombrero and making a gracious gesture, exclaimed: "You are an old enchantress." This non serviam was recorded in a morning of world history. It was not a capricious shout nor a superficial act of rebellion. It was the result of an entire evolution, the sum of multiple experiences. The poet in the full consciousness of his past and future flung at the world his declaration of independence from Nature. He no longer wanted to serve it in the capacity of slave. The poet said to his brothers: "Up to now we have done nothing but imitate the world in its aspects, we have created nothing..." Non serviam. I do not have to be your slave, Mother Nature; I shall be your master... I shall have my trees which will not be like yours, I shall have my mountains, I shall have my rivers, I shall have my sky and my stars. And you will not be able to tell me: "This tree is bad, I don't like that sky... mine are better." I would reply to you that my skies and my trees are my own and not yours and they don't have to look like each other... Adiós, old enchantress; adiós, Mother and Stepmother, I shall not detest you nor curse you for the years of slavery in your service. They were the most precious instruction. All I desire is not to forget your lessons, but now I am at an age when I can walk alone through these worlds. Through your world and mine.
Read also:
Margaret Lees McTague “Writing in scale Huidobro’s Altazor and Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine”
