Böcker av Vicente Huidobro

This volume includes the 4 chapbooks published in 1917-18 and presents, at first glance, an odd mixture. Chronologically, we have El espejo de agua, written in 1914-16, first published in 1916, but, to all intents and purposes not distributed until 1918. Horizon carré(see below) follows and then come Ecuatorial (written in Spanish), Poemas árticos, Hallali and Tour Eiffel, the last two being composed in French. The last two publications from this period, Hallali and Tour Eiffel-both marked by textual experimentation-were very important for the rising wave of the Spanish avant-garde. In this second edition, we have added an appendix containing the French version of the title poem, Équatoriale, which is at least partly translated by the author, an early version of Tour Eiffel as published in the magazine Nord-Sud, together with a Spanish version of the finished poem.

Satyr is Huidobro's last novel, published in Santiago in 1939, at a time when little of his work was in print in his native land. While that situation would be rectified two years later, with the release of two major poetry collections, this volume is his final work in prose, and one that has mostly escaped attention since. Closer examination of the text reveals however that it contains a number of the author's literary, social, political and philosophical preoccupations, with many themes from his poems, essays, and manifestos re-occurring in the book, the protagonist of which, Bernardo Saguen, may be regarded on one level as a failed artist. This would-be writer is one that goes to the bad, and whose mental collapse - he seems to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia - and moral disintegration seem to parallel the kind of disintegration seen in some of the author's later poems. Written at a time when Huidobro was unsure of his literary position in Chile, the book is much concerned with the idea of poetic creation, while also worrying at the concept of reality, whether artistic creations are part of reality itself, and whether the artist himself is part of reality. As the novel proceeds, Saguen finds himself increasingly untethered from that reality as he has a nervous breakdown, only for his return to a measure of sanity and composure to coincide with horror, and then total mental collapse. The reader's sympathies lie with him at the outset, but we have only his word for the events that transpire; his unreliability as a narrator becomes ever more obvious, and clues begin to mount. Have we, as readers been deceived by a monstrous and amoral egoist, or have we really observed a total mental breakdown, as it was happening? Nothing is clear at the end, apart from the horror.

Adverse Winds (Vientos contrarios) is a collection of essays, aphorisms, and observations, published by Huidobro in Santiago in 1926, after many years in Europe.At this remove it is perhaps difficult to grasp that in 1926, Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948), who had cut something of a swathe through literary Paris - albeit not quite as thorough a swathe as he would sometimes have us believe - was almost unknown back home in Santiago. He had published nothing there apart from self-financed volumes of juvenilia before his departure for Paris in 1916, and his new avant-garde work from the Paris period was mostly unknown and mostly not very welcome in backward Santiago.Needing to attract some attention upon his return, Huidobro assembled this collection of statements, aphorisms and cod-memoirs as an introduction to the serious new self that he wished to present to those who might have heard a few rumours of his successes abroad, but would be puzzled by having seen nothing of his writing. The soon-to-be broken marriage and the surrounding scandal were to ruin his attempts in this direction, and caused his flight back to Europe, this time alone and pursued by death-threats from irate relatives of his new paramour. Looked at objectively, the book is a grab-bag, including some fascinating and notorious statements (the poet is a little god; I will be the premier poet of my time, etc.), alongside a number of interesting sideswipes at writers he wished to denigrate. His excursions - daring for their time - into matters of love, sex and infidelity in the book must have struck many after his hurried departure as being, at the very least, misguided. The heartfelt tribute to Teresa Wilms, a great beauty, and a talented prose-writer, dead by her own hand at 28, is undermined somewhat by that fact Vicente had had an affair with her in 1916 and that just about everyone in the tight-knit aristocratic circles in which he moved would have known this. One imagines that his now-estranged wife would have been doubly unamused.The book should be seen as an adjunct to the previous year's collection of Manifestos (also available in this series), and as another staging post on the poet's path towards a position of mastery.

This book was published in Santiago in 1941, as one of a pair of volumes that summed up Huidobro's shorter poems from 1924 to 1938. It contains some of his finest shorter poems, which are somewhat more surrealist than he would have cared to admit. This volume is vital to an understanding of the range and complexity of Huidobro's poetic achievement.

Adam is a young man's book, but it represents a major advance for Huidobro. Written 1914-1916 and published July 1916, the work was rapidly left behind as he adopted more avant-garde forms, but it still repays one's attention today.

Ecuatorial se dispersa por el mundo para interpretar la marca temeraria del tiempo. A través de versos largos, mayúsculas caprichosas, y un terco espaciamiento, da cuenta de que lo que sobrevive ante la muerte es el poema. El cielo es una metáfora de fuego, y las calles por donde caminan los viandantes, una cárcel permanente. El poeta mira el cielo en llamas, y transita por la tierra hirviendo como un volcán. El poema viaja cruzando mares y ciudades llenas de humo negro. El poema salta el muro de la indiferencia, lucha contra la derrota y se asombra con la vida. EL mundo partido por la mitad, sobrevive. MIGUEL ÁNGEL ZAPATA

Huidobro published this collection of manifestos and statements on poetics in 1925, and it summed up the previous 8 or 9 years of his work. The truth is, however, that he was already moving away from some of the positions espoused in this volume, and it was one of his last original publications in French.

In 1931, Huidobro and Arp together wrote Tres novelas exemplares (Three Exemplary Novels), a set of wild quasi-surrealist "stories". In 1935, Huidobro offered the set to a publisher in Santiago, but was told that the book was too short, and so wrote two further solo stories. The contents are therefore not three, not huge and not novels.

Before attaining his poetic maturity - and this would be through poems written mostly in Spanish - Huidobro wrote these two collections in French and published them in Paris in 1925, the same year that a volume of his manifestos appeared (see below). The two books have never been republished in France, and only in collected editions in Chile.

In 1928, shortly after his marriage to Ximena Amunategui, and after meeting Douglas Fairbanks, Huidobro began writing his version of the Cid legend as a novel. The result is a highly readable version of the story, that casts aside the style of romantic 19th-century historical fiction in favour of more modern approaches and cinematic influences.

Cagliostro is a lurid tale of magic and secret societies during the reign of Luis XVI, centred on the figure of the Italian occultist Giuseppe Balsamo, known under his alias of Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. The book owes its style of presentation to the example of German expressionist cinema, of the kind exemplified by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

This selected edition presents an overview of all of Huidobro's work, from 1914 until 1948, moving from the early symbolist work, though the high avant-garde phase, then through the highpoint of his career with Altazor and Skyquake, and on into the late poetry which settles down into a post-vanguard style. Also includes manifestos and interviews.

Square Horizon is Huidobro's first book in French and is heavily influenced by the work of Apollinaire, but it marks the author's definitive arrival on the avant-garde scene in Paris, and kicks off a frenetic period of two years in which he published two full collections and four chapbooks.

Skyquake is a sustained lyric effusion of a kind that Huidobro had not previously produced, and it marks the point at which his work moves on from the barnstorming avant-garderie of his younger years to a more mature style, albeit one influenced by surrealism. A book-length prose-poems on the thermos of love, sex and death.

Huidobro published Poemas articos in Madrid in 1918, this being the last of a rapid series of publications which established him as a major new talent both in French and in Spanish. The volume was his longest Spanish-language collection up to this point, and marks a significant breakthrough.