Vincente Huidobro

 

Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) and Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Tour Eiffel. Poème par Vincente Huidobro; peintures par Robert Delaunay (Madrid: privately printed, 1918). 

Vicente Huidobor

 

The first modern poet of the Spanish language — in many ways its Apollinaire — Vicente Huidobro is generally considered to be one of the four greatest Spanish American poets of [the last] century. Yet unlike his peers — César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz — Huidobro is still little-known in the English-speaking world.

Altazor, a book-length poem first published in 1931, is Huidobro’s masterpiece and one of the wildest poems of any language. The century’s great paean to flight, the poem sends its hero (Altazor, the antipoet) hurtling through Einsteinian space at light-speed, as all places and times collapse into one.” (from the back cover)

Publisher Compañia Ibero Americana de Publicaciones, Madrid/Barcelona/Buenos Aires, 1931
111 pages

Bilingual Spanish/English edition
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Publisher Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1988
A Palabra Sur Book
ISBN 1555971067
167 pages
via filboid

Vicente Huidobro

 

Vicente Huidobro

 

    portrait by Picasso

MINUIT

Les heures glissent
Comme des gouttes d’eau sur une vitr                                                                    Silence de Minuit

La peur se déroule dans l’air 

Et le vent

                se cache au fond du puits

                            OH

                        C’est une feuille
                            on pense que la terre va finir

                            Le temps

                                                        remue dans l’ombre

tout le monde dort

                                    UN SOUPIR

Dans la maison quelqu’un vient de mourir

                                                                    translated by the author from the original Spanish

                                                                     (From Horizon Carré, Paris : Paul Birault, 1917.)                

silence de minuit

Dans la maison quelqu’un vient de mourir
(From Horizon Carré, Paris : Paul Birault, 1917.)

Nicanor Parra

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 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)

Nicanor Parra

Something Like That (excerpt) PARRA LAUGHS like he’s condemned to hell but when haven’t poets laughed? at least he declares that he’s laughing they pass the years pass the years at least they seem to be passing hypothesis non fingo  everything goes on as if they were passing now he starts to cry forgetting that he’s an antipoet 0 STOP RACKING YOUR BRAINS nobody reads poetry nowadays it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad 0 FOUR DEFECTS that my Ophelia won’t forgive me for: old lowlife communist and National Literature Prize <<My family may be able to forgive you  for the first three but never for the last>> 0 MY CORPSE and I understand each other marvelously my corpse asks me: do you believe in God? and I respond with a hearty NO my corpse asks: do you believe in the government? and I respond with the hammer and sickle my corpse asks: do you believe in the police? and I respond with a punch in the face then he gets up out of his coffin and we go arm in arm to the altar 0 THE TRUE PROBLEM of philosophy is who does the dishes nothing otherworldly God     the truth         the passage of time absolutely but first, who does the dishes whoever wants to do them, go ahead see ya later, alligator         and we're right back to being enemies 0 HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT compose a sonnet     that begins with the following iambic pentameter line:     I would prefer to die ahead of you and that ends with the following:     I would prefer that you be first to die 0

Nicanor Parra

 

Acacias 

Strolling many years ago

Down a street taken over by acacias in bloom

I found out from a friend who knows everything

That you had just gotten married.

I told him that I really

Had nothing to do with it.

I never loved you

— You know that better than I do —

Yet each time the acacias bloom

— Can you believe it? —

I get the very same feeling I had

When they hit me point-blank

With the heartbreaking news

That you had married someone else.
— translated by David Unger

Nicanor Parra

“Estados Unidos: el país donde
la libertad es una estatua.”
–Nicanor Parra, Artefactos

“United States: the country where
liberty is a statue”.

Translated by Anna Deeny

Pablo Neruda

Gentleman Alone

The young maricones and the horny muchachas, 
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia, 
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant, 
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night, 
Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters 
Surround my solitary home, 
Enemies of my soul, 
Conspirators in pajamas 
Who exchange deep kisses for passwords. 
Radiant summer brings out the lovers 
In melancholy regiments, 
Fat and thin and happy and sad couples; 
Under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon, 
There is a continual life of pants and panties, 
A hum from the fondling of silk stockings, 
And women's breasts that glisten like eyes. 
The salary man, after a while, 
After the week's tedium, and the novels read in bed at night, 
Has decisively fucked his neighbor, 
And now takes her to the miserable movies, 
Where the heroes are horses or passionate princes, 
And he caresses her legs covered with sweet down 
With his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes. 
The night of the hunter and the night of the husband 
Come together like bed sheets and bury me, 
And the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are masturbating, 
And the animals mount each other openly, 
And the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically, 
And cousins play strange games with cousins, 
And doctors glower at the husband of the young patient, 
And the early morning in which the professor, without a thought, 
Pays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast, 
And to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly 
On beds big and tall as ships: 
So, eternally, 
This twisted and breathing forest crushes me 
With gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth 
And black roots like fingernails and shoes. 

Translated by Mike Topp