During the interwar period, Pablo Neruda’s great rival in Chile’s “literary battle” was Vicente Huidobro, whose figure has become the epitome of the poetic vanguard. Nicanor Parra gave a personal homage to Huidobro and his oeuvre in a speech marking the centenary of Huidobro’s birth in 1993. In this lab work, carried out around the same time, Parra ironizes the legend maintaining that Huidobro, upon his return from Europe — where he traveled during World War II as a war correspondent and accompanied the allied forces upon their arrival into Berlin — took with him, as loot, one of Adolf Hitler’s telephones.
LXXXII
anyway
He was the one who set the first stone
As well as the antepenultimate
Of that building called New Chilean Poetry
When Neftalí Reyes
Had not yet changed his name
Those were the days of the First World War
Those were the nights of the Second World War
He came down from his ivory tower
He said nope
To all forms of dimwitarianism
Let Hitler’s telephone say it
Nicanor Parra, “Also Sprach Altazor” (1993) (translated by Magdalena Edwards)
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