Altazor

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.

VICENTE HUIDOBRO (1893-1948), a Chilean who lived mainly in Europe, was a trilingual poet, painter, war correspondent, founder of newspapers and literary magazines, Hollywood screenwriter, and candidate for president of Chile. ELIOT WEINBERGER's recent books are Karmic Traces, 9/12 and The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. His edition of Jorge Luis Borges' Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.