Altazor

by Vicente Huidobro

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,...

• 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.