Vicente Huidobro: Altazor, or, A Voyage in a Parachute/1919, a Poem in VII Cantos (1931–) [ES, EN]

“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

Commentary: MemoriaChilena (ES), Justin Read (Translation Review, 2006, pp 61-65, EN), Mario Nandayapa (Liminar, 2006, ES), Bruce Dean Willis (Hispanic Issues, 2010, EN), Comparative analysis with Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine (Margaret Lees McTague, Master’s Thesis, 1976, EN).

PDF, PDF, HTML (Spanish, 1931, updated on 2020-12-6)
PDF (Spanish/English, 1988)
PDF, PDF (manuscript, Spanish)
Audio books (Spanish)
See also Altazor: de puño y letra (Spanish, ed. & with notes by Andrés Morales, 1999)