The Selected Poetry

by Vicente Huidobro, David M. Guss (Editor)

This is the first major collection of the great Chilean writer's work to appear in English. Huidobro is considered one of the most significant poets of our century and is recognized as one of the seminal figures in modern Spanish-language poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Literature

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He was an exponent of the artistic movement called Creacionismo ("Creationism"), which held that a poet should bring life to the things he or she writes about, rather than just describe them.

Huidobro was born into a wealthy family in Santiago. After spending his first years in Europe, he enrolled in a Jesuit secondary school in Santiago where he was expelled for using a ring, which he claimed, was for marriage. He studied literature at the University of Chile and published "Ecos del alma" ( Soul's Echoes ) in 1911, a work with modernist tendencies. The following year he married, and started to edit the journal "Musa Joven" ( Young Muse ), where part of his later book, "Canciones en la noche" ( Songs in the Night ) appeared, as well as his first calligram, "Triángulo armónico" ( Harmonic Triangle ).

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

We were the sun's chosen ones
And we didn't know it
We were the highest star's elected
And we didn't know how to answer its gift
Anguish of impotence
Water loved us
The earth loved us
The woods were ours
Ecstasy was our only home
Your glance was the universe face to face
Your beauty was the sound of the dawn
Spring was loved by the trees
Now we are just a contagious grief
A death before its time
The soul that doesn't know where it is
Winter in the bones without a flash of lightning
And all this because you didn't know what eternity was
You didn't understand the soul of my soul on its ship of darkness
On its eagle's throne wounded by the infinite

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This afternoon I saw
The latest phonographic presses
It was a maze of screams
And songs as varied
As in foreign ports

Tomorrow's men
Will come to decipher the hieroglyphics
We leave today
Written in reverse
On the girders of the Eiffel Tower

We reached the battle's end
My watch lost all its time

I slowly cross over you
Age cut in two

And by a bridge
Over a bloody river
I travel west

****

I can't tell blonde from brunette anymore
Let's leave public squares to sailors
Among my islands come and watch
The still life of moonlight with plate
At water's edge
And the rose shedding petals on the bird that sings
At forty past midnight

Forget about me
Little hidden star
This is the hour I perfume my forest

Forget about me
Pilot with no ship and no laws

****

Lady there are too many birds
In your piano
Dragging autumn over a thick
Forest of palpitating nerves and dragonflies

Sometimes the trees
In unsuspected arpeggios
Lose their global orientation

Lady I can hear anything. Without chloroform
I go down to the depths of dawn

****

If I were a stream or a tourist
You'd love me the way you love artists
But I hate winter and the eye's lids
And your little star wonderous as it turns

I like patience and the swallow
The bed with sails for the dreamless voyage
As waves consume the precise night
And the head rises and the balloon bursts
Under the paper moon which slides away
Looking for words hung from the sky

[Cristobal Suazo · Rating 4 out of 5]

La verdad es que me pareció una gran recopilación, abarca mucho de la obra de Huidobro, por lo que sirve para familiarizarse con el autor. Creo que incluir poemas en francés tanto en su idioma original como traducidos le otorga cierto valor al libro, pero por lo mismo se ocupa el doble de espacio dentro de su reducida cantidad de páginas.

Al ser una antología de un autor con tan extenso catálogo, el libro tiene muy poco de muchas cosas, Altazor y Temblor de cielo estan en fragmentos y los bellos últimos poemas solo ocupan unas cuantas páginas.

De todas maneras, la selección de poemas, aunque reducida es espectacular y el hecho de que incluyeran manifiestos para comenzar y terminar el libro me parece brillante.

[doña noelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

te quiero Lina, para mí siempre estarás ligada a Huidobro

un besito

[Andrés · Rating 3 out of 5]

Siendo mi primer acercamiento a Huidobro, debo decir que fue placentero mas no sencillo de leer e interpretar. Tuve que acostumbrarme a su ritmo y dejarme llevar como en una montaña rusa sin detenerme a analizar verso por verso. El poema que más me gustó fue "Primer amor " donde dibuja a Eva bellamente. Sentí que podía tocarla, palparla y adorarla . Fui Adán en ese hermoso poema.

Buscaré un poco más de su poesía para empaparme mejor de su estilo.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the "lost" treasures of Latin American poetry. I'm glad Drew Kunz added this to his list. This is a remarkable book with a rich gathering of translators rendering Huidobro's work into English. The introduction is also enlightening, particularly the story of Huidobro on his deathbed, holding the mirror before his breath. Huidobro--THE "creationist"--was a unique voice, one well worth investigating. I give this book, and Huidobro's work in general, my highest ranking.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a magnificent poet! Friend of Picasso (who wasn't in those days?) and a man of great wit and charm. Sadly this book is not in print anymore. I dream of going to a bookstore and finding nothing but New Directions editions of all the greats. Wouldn't that be grand?

[Ave del sur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siendo primera vez que leo a Huidobro fue un buen acercamiento

[imeda · Rating 4 out of 5]

"you must not look through these poems for a memory of things seen, nor the possibility of seeing other things. a poem is a poem, just as an orange is an orange, and not an apple. you will not find things that already existed nor come into direct contact with objects of the external world. the poet will no longer imitate nature, for he doesn’t allow himself the right to plagiarize god. you will find what you have never seen before: the poem. a creation of man. and of all human forces, that which interests us the most, is the creative force."

my biggest sin as an english major is that i generally don't enjoy poetry. i don't know why!! i've just never been a poetry person! this isn't to say that i hate poetry because i certainly don't and it's also not to say that i never read poetry because i read quite a bit of it! i've always just enjoyed prose more than poetry. it's just a personal opinion and maybe it's the wrong opinion, but it's something about me that i have tried to change and never been able to.

i enjoyed this poetry! there were quite a few that i read and went "wow i need to write this down somewhere" because sometimes a couple lines would just hit me. there were definitely some poems that i didn't enjoy as much as i did others, but that's the thing about any collection, whether it be poetry or short stories—there are going to be weak points and there are going to be strong points. i think the best way to rate any type of collection is to think about if the good pieces outweigh the bad ones and the case of this collection, i think they do!

i don't know if i can properly articulate my thoughts on this in a review without sounding utterly incomprehensible (as i usually do) because the whole time, it kinda just felt like i was going on a rollercoaster where i would be reading a poem i really fucking loved and then the next one would be kinda gimmicky and not my cup of tea (when i refer to a poem as gimmicky, i especially mean ones that rely too heavily on repetition like the one that repeats "mill" like 200 million times, which i'm sure wasn't quite so gimmicky in the time period that they were written, but in the big 2025, they are not my cup of tea because i've seen them done poorly so many times).

generally pretty good! i wish i liked poetry more, but it's just not my absolute favourite thing to read. i did really enjoy the manifesto section! more good than bad in this collection! i think vicente huidobro was clearly a very talented writer.

[María José · Rating 4 out of 5]

Objetivamente, son muy buenos los poemas. El estilo creacionista no me encanta, ni el paternalismo que hay detrás de repetir tanto “el hombre”, ni la manera de escribir de esa época vanguardista de la primera mitad del siglo 20. All in all, es una buena recopilación de poemas. “¿Qué entierro es este en qué te entierras / En los pechos extraños?” Mi favorito fue “Balada de lo que no vuelve”

Un cacho del de “Ella”:
Ella llevaba una camisa ardiente
Ella tenía ojos de adormecedora de mares
Ella había escondido un sueño en un armario oscuro
Ella había encontrado un muerto en medio de su cabeza

[Juan Alberto Yoga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Touch my soul...

[Annie Cardelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve had this book for years but I can never remember his name

[Lúmina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este poemario, selección de poemas de entre algunas obras principales de Huidobro, me ha dejado con ganas de leer más, de sentir más, de esperar más de la poesía de este hombre.

[Blurp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rich guy uses funny language to talk about the stars and flying and trees and things like that a long time ago.

Lots of children, nature and musing on the ontology of language.

This is a broad collection with some of the early French stuff, bits of the understandably well-regarded 'Altazor' and a nice smattering of the later super-rad stuff that reads like Homer if Homer knew how to do something other than make a list of what a superhero were doing meanwhile pretending all the while that humans are about as psychologically complex as a clamshell. So basically, this is like if Homer were on mushrooms: it's trippy, but there is a strange 'foregrounding' everywhere and a lack of depth even with the conspicuous surplus of narcissistic id.

He's really obsessed with the act of writing and probably thought himself to be a real genius because he knew how to write poems. I suppose confidence is nice:

from 'Altazor: Canto III':

Y puesto que debemos vivir y no nos suicidamos
Mientras vivamos juguemos
El simple sport de los vocablos
De la pura palabra y nada más

Translation is fine (shared by many translators, each with his/her own style that, in general, stays with the literal).

This is famous stuff, so read it, it's nice.

[Antonia]

Antología poética es una compilación hecha por José Manuel Zañartu de los mejores poemas del poeta Vicente Huidobro, en la cual se seleccionan poemas de sus manifiestos Non serviam y El creacionismo, entregándonos así lo más representativo de la obra Hudobriana. Lo más interesante de este libro es que se adjuntan los poemas en su idioma original, francés, además de estos mismos traducidos al castellano donde se nota un gran esfuerzo por transcribir el ritmo y la musicalidad, entregando una experiencia más completa y de comparación a quienes manejan ambos idiomas.
Recomiendo los escritos de este libro a niños de 10 a 12 años para que realicen una lectura independiente, sin embargo, me parece que es un libro que está más dirigido a profesores que se dediquen a trabajar en este rango de edad, para que puedan tener acceso a los poemas y discriminar según los que encuentren necesarios para sus clases.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

infinitely more modern than dario, although he's not so far removed in time. huidobro was well travelled, and his work reads much the way many of his contemporaries' does - allusive, richly symbolic, full of associate leaps and boundless energy. i like it, but i also have a saturation point. "express" and "eiffel tower" were ones i particularly liked. the translators have done a bang up job, the sounds of the poems in english is still quite lovely.

[Josef · Rating 4 out of 5]

Huidobro's reaching to grasp or express the root and goal of things is sometimes painful, sometimes exasperating, sometimes frustrating, but always exciting and worthwhile, even if one sometimes grows out of it for awhile, the idolatry of the poetic sensibility. I'm older now and when I go back to a Huidobro or a Borges, I see the thing a bit clearer for what it is, the passion to wonder, and that's just about as grand of an emotion one can have isn't it?

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Through whoever dreams
Mooningbook crystal moon
Wherein dreams
Where I rule"

AND HE DOES RULE! An old friend of mine doesn't care for some of the translations in this book, but I've liked this book for years and can't help it! And isn't that a cool Juan Gris portrait of Huidobro on the cover?

CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

[Arlene · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the poetry in this book tedious, at least in English. This is a bilingual edition, so that you can see that the sound of words often drives the poetry--and that's lost in the English. Translations by various people. Some of the early poems are in French, most in Huidobro's native Spanish.

[Sasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few scattered lines of absolute genius suspended in an ocean of bland phrases spiced with a healthy dose of megalomania.

[Felipe Barros · Rating 3 out of 5]

El poeta que más me ha llenado el corazón de pena y soledad.