Skyquake

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Tony Frazer. The prose-poem TEMBLOR DE CIELO is more apparently unified work than its contemporary work, Altazor, although this might owe more to its style of delivery: an ecstatic outpouring of words that largely revolve around the themes of love, sex and death. The Isolde to whom much of the poem is addressed is an idealised feminine figure--part goddess, part idealised beloved, part Isolde from Wagner's opera (another ecstatic outpouring on the theme of love, sex and death) and part Ximena Amunátegui, the young woman who had become the poet's second wife. The poem is also a sustained lyric effusion of a kind that Huidobro had never produced before, 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 movement which Huidobro had previously attacked. It is also the last time that Huidobro was to adopt the god-like narrative persona that occurs in his earlier work. In TEMBLOR, as in some earlier works, God is conflated with the poet-creator, as he is in Altazor, where the opening lines reflect the opening of a love-poem addressed to Ximena that the author published (to great scandal) in the Santiago newspaper, La Nación.

• | Author: Vicente Huidobro, Tony Frazer
• | Publisher: Shearsman Books
• | Publication Date: Jan 15, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 80 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1848616414
• | ISBN-13: 9781848616417