Review (PDF) Altazor (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
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.
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Wesleyan; Trans. from the Spanish edition (January 2, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0819566780
ISBN-13: 978-0819566782
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.4 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #918,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #146 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Regional & Cultural > European > Spanish & Portuguese #246 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Regional & Cultural > European > Spanish
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.
Huidobro is one of the great figures of Latin American writing. I read "Altazor" as a research project in college. There was no handy translation available. The joy of dual language books is that you can read the original with a little help from the translation to make it easy - but you must enjoy the sound of the original, particularly in the case of "Altazor." This translation, like any other translation of poetry, will fail. All the more reason to enjoy the original."Altazor" is a poem, but it is also an essay on the reality of art - "poeta, mago, dios."Also, I recommend, the "Obras Completas."
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.
This poem absolutely blew me away. It's a fun, thought-provoking, and unprecedented literary experiment that deconstructs the very concept of language and presents something new and beautiful.
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