The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) briefly settled in Madrid during the fall of 1918 after having spent almost two years in Paris. During his time in France, Huidobro became fluent in French, composed five collections of poetry, founded the avant-garde journal Nord-Sud with the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy, and more important, established the main theoretical foundations of his very own avant-garde movement, a poetics he called creacionismo (creationism).1 Soon after his arrival in Paris in 1916, Huidobro befriended key members of the Parisian avant-garde; he became an important member of a group of poets and artists that included Juan Gris, Max Jacob, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Blaise Cendrars, and even a young Ezra Pound.2 The arrival of Huidobro in Madrid in 1918 had a major impact on its literary and cultural scene, since he essentially served as an invaluable cultural bridge between Paris, the thriving and cosmopolitan cultural capital of Europe during the first two decades of the century, and Madrid, the capital of Spain, a city then culturally more dormant and provincial when compared to Paris.3 Huidobro brought with him to Madrid a firsthand knowledge of the main currents of avant-garde art, poetry, and poetics mostly absent from Spain prior to his arrival, as well as a wide array of relevant avant-garde figures escaping from the aftermath of World War I, such as Sonia and Robert Delaunay and the Polish painters Wladyslaw Jald and Marjan Paskiewic. In Madrid, Huidobro quickly became the most influential figure of a group of poets and writers that included the Spanish authors Rafael Cansinos-Assens and Guillermo de Torre, and which eventually led to the creation of ultraísmo, arguably the main literary group originating in Spain that belonged to the historical avant-garde. However, the great impact of Huidobro in Madrid upon his arrival stemmed not only from his important connections in Paris and his own considerable impact on the Parisian Avant-garde scene per se, but also, and perhaps more importantly, from what the Basque poet Juan Larrea refers to as a new Entusiasmo del Nuevo Mundo (enthusiasm of the New World) that sparked an unprecedented avant-garde artistic reaction in Europe, and particularly in Spain:
Vicente Huidobro importó a Europa un entusiasmo juvenil, de cepa americana, que la literatura europea desconocía por completo. De ahí la brillantez incomparable de sus metáforas. . . . Por medio del ultraísmo, nacido a su calor, ese su entusiasmo del Nuevo Mundo prendió en España y se propagó a toda la poesía nueva que directa o indirectamente le debe no poco. (Larrea, quoted in Bary, 359)
Vicente Huidobro imported to Europe a juvenile enthusiasm of an American root that was completely unknown to European literature. Thus the incomparable brilliance of his metaphors. . . . By means of ultraísmo, born around his spark, his New World enthusiasm caught fire in Spain, and it expanded to the new poetry that directly or indirectly owes him a considerable amount.
Larrea clearly places considerable importance on how Huidobro’s position as a Latin American writer ignited a creative spark that was particularly alien to European and Spanish literature and culture at the time. Although his “New World” origins clearly played a role in the development, circulation, and dissemination of Huidobro’s own strand of avant-garde poetics in Paris and Madrid, his own transatlantic condition is slightly more problematic than what the idealized and exoticizing “brilliance” Larrea describes regarding creacionismo might seem to suggest.
In contrast to Larrea, the Chilean literary scholar Jaime Concha points to the actual tension and compulsion at the core of Huidobro’s transatlantic condition that clearly problematizes Larrea’s conception of Huidobro’s characteristic “juvenile enthusiasm” and its implications of a regenerative but exoticized creative impulse. As Concha succinctly states, Huidobro’s constant transatlantic journeying reveals the problematic condition at the heart of his avant-garde poetic project, which has been generally overlooked in the critical assessment of creacionismo as an avant-garde poetics: “En Huidobro, el nomadismo es pulsión; sus transhumancias marinas proceden del fondo del deseo” (Concha, 63; In Huidobro, his nomadism is a form of pulsion; his sea migrations originate from the depths of desire). More important, for Concha, Huidobro’s nomadic cosmopolitanism not only articulates the actual transatlantic crossings for the historical Vicente Huidobro—for whom “el viaje fue siempre desgarramiento, tensión, encruzijada” (journeying was always rupture, tension and a dilemma)—but also the planetary and utopic dimension of creacionismo as an avant-garde poetics in which, as Concha, in clear reference to Huidobro’s Altazor, suggests:
El símbolo armonioso de las golondrinas es más bien un ansia y un anhelo, y no la proyección de su íntima verdad transatlántica. Es el vaivén, ése de las golondrinas purificado de todo; sin mar ni tierra, sístole y diástole de una circulación planetaria. (Concha, 63)
The harmonious symbol of the swallow is more a desire and a wish, and not the projection of its inner transatlantic truth. It is the comings and goings of the swallow, purified of everything; without sea or land, systole and diastole of a planetary circulation.
Although there is no doubt that the revolutionary and inspiring spark associated with Huidobro’s creacionismo in Paris and Madrid is partly connected to his Latin American roots, as Larrea argues, Concha’s analysis allows us to see Huidobro’s role within the transatlantic circulation of avant-garde poetics in a different light. Following Concha’s remarks, the remarkable impact of Huidobro’s creacionista poetic compositions resides in the creative force inherent in the tension at the core of his complex transatlantic position—i.e., between a “real” Huidobro constantly circulating the two worlds separated by the Atlantic and an authorial Huidobro attempting to overcome this transatlantic tension through the development of an avant-garde poetics that could create the image of a unified and utopic planetary experience, such as the example of the image of the “golondrina” (swallow)—that famously appears in Huidobro’s masterpiece Altazor, translated into English by Eliot Weinberger:
Como las gaviotas vomitan el horizonte
Y las golondrinas el verano
No hay tiempo que perder
Ya viene la golondrina monotémpora
Trae un acento antípoda de lejanías que se acercan
Viene gondoleando la golondrina.
(Huidobro, Altazor; Temblor de cielo, 88)
As seagulls vomit the horizon
And swallows the summer
There’s no time to lose
Look here swoops the monochronic swallow
With an antipodal tone of approaching distance
Here swoops the swallowing swallow.
(Huidobro, Altazor, or a Voyage in a Parachute, 89)
As I will show in what follows, the revolutionary newness of Huidobro’s creacionismo as a poetics emerges as an avant-garde response to a personal and geopolitical transatlantic tension between conflicting forms of literature, tradition, and history. Ultimately, creacionismo constitutes an overall planetary quest toward a poietic absolute that takes the “real” Huidobro across different and divergent histories, languages, parts of the world, and literary traditions, through the very series of formal “displacements” and substitutions that articulate his poetics. In this sense, Martin Puchner has precisely emphasized in his study of manifestos and the avant-garde how the mechanisms of “displacements and replacements” that characterize Huidobro’s creacionista poetics also happen to articulate the form of his transatlantic journeys in the following terms:
One might describe these travels as a combination of displacement and replacement, displacement from putative origins and their replacement by travels and transient places. This effect of displacement and replacement is in fact intimately connected to the foundational force of the manifesto. . . . These manifestos respond to the experience of displacement by trying to create places, by replacing the lost with the new. (Puchner, 174)
The Transatlantic Circulation of Huidobro’s Creacionismo
Perhaps the most important characteristic of Huidobro’s influential creacionismo as a poetic project belonging to what Peter Bürger refers to as the “historical Avant-garde” is that it became an idiosyncratic historical event that aimed at carrying out a fundamental critique of poetry as an artistic medium. In fact, soon after he had first landed in Europe from Chile, Huidobro quickly turned his poetics into a fully developed set of theoretical principles, poetry collections, various manifestos, journals and art exhibitions connected with each other through his particular use of creacionismo as the key concept sustaining his overall artistic project. Hence, what Huidobro imported from the New World was not so much a different kind of “enthusiasm,” as Larrea argues, but more precisely an idiosyncratic form of making history, literary or otherwise, that is inherently connected to the complex dynamics of displacement and circulation of Huidobro’s transatlantic condition.
A rather symptomatic sample of the tremendous impact—verging on religious fervor—that the arrival of Huidobro’s creacionista poetics had in the literary circles of Madrid is explicitly stated by the poet and critic Guillermo de Torre in a personal letter to Huidobro after one of his early visits to the Spanish capital:
Sin embargo para su íntima consolación en los repliegues psíquicos intersticiales de nuestros corazones flotantes quedaba pulsátil una cordial estela de perceptiva irradiación lírica, dinámicamente creadora. Así al glisar de las horas las fragantes semillas que usted arrojó magnánimo, los módulos inéditos que usted descubrió ante nuestros trémulos espíritus atónitos han ido arraigando purificados en su devenir de evolutiva gestación triunfal. (Bajarlía, La polémica Reverdy-Huidobro, 52)
However, for your intimate consolation, a cordial trail of a lyrical perceptual irradiation remained pulsating in the psychic interstitial folds of our floating hearts, dynamically creative. Thus, after the passing of the hours, the fragrant seeds you magnanimously spread among us, the new modules you discovered in front of our astonished, tremulous spirits have been taking purified root in their evolutionary becoming of a triumphal gestation.
De Torre’s generously hyperbolic tone of astonishment when describing Huidobro’s “dynamic creativity” is extremely suggestive of the kind of reaction and response surrounding Huidobro’s presence in Madrid during 1918 and 1919. The newness of creacionismo as a historical and literary event soon inspired the creation of ultraísmo as an avant-garde collective movement essentially developed by two of Huidobro’s friends in Madrid, the aforementioned Cansinos-Assens and de Torre himself, who would later become the brother-in-law of Jorge Luis Borges through his marriage with Norah Borges in 1928.
Although of relatively brief life, ultraísmo had a major impact on the evolution of twentieth-century poetry produced in Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic; it influenced the work of major Spain-based poets as diverse as Larrea and Gerardo Diego, as well as the work of the young Borges, who after a brief period in Madrid imported his rather Borgesian version of ultraísmo to Latin America in general, and Argentina in particular. While Huidobro’s work originally triggered an enthusiastic outburst of avant-garde cultural production in Madrid, the reception of his work was less enthusiastic in the literary circles of his native Chile. Particularly relevant are the following comments by the Chilean literary critic Hernán Díaz Arrieta, who in 1919 expressed the intrinsic difficulty of Huidobro’s creacionismo as follows:
El Creacionismo es una cosa rara y difícil, algo como una nueva lengua literaria, . . . Esto ya no es quitar los altares ni sustituir un culto por otro; es remover las columnas del templo, echar abajo los muros, arrasar la tierra y mirar—o querer mirar—desde un mundo nuevo, astros y planetas diferentes.” (Díaz Arrieta, “El creacionismo,” as quoted in Costa, En Pos de Huidobro, 51)
Creacionismo is a weird and difficult thing, something like a new literary language, . . . It is not just about dismantling the altars, nor substituting one cult for another; it is about removing the very pillars of the temple, tearing the walls down, destroying the earth and looking—or desiring to look—from a new world at different stars and planets.
The aura of revolutionary change with which Díaz Arrieta describes creacionismo as a radical new way of looking at the universe is intrinsically connected to what Bürger refers to as a “change in the means of artistic representation” that characterizes for him the historical avant-garde. Bürger rejects Theodor Adorno’s conception of the category of the new as a category of modern art, particularly as developed in his Aesthetic Theory. Bürger characterizes Adorno’s own analysis of the category of the modern as “a necessary duplication of what dominates the commodity society” (Bürger, 61), a definition that for Bürger entails a “failure to precisely historicize the category of the new.” Since the avant-garde did not aim at a “change in the means of artistic representation,” Bürger argues, but rather a “change in the representational system,” the category of the new as used by Adorno in his critique of modern art does not necessarily apply to the historical avant-garde:
If we sought to understand a change in the means of artistic representation, the category of the new would be applicable. But since the historical avant-garde movements cause a break with tradition and a subsequent change in the representational system, the category is not suitable for a description of how things are. And this all the less when one considers that the historical avant-garde movements not only intend to break with the traditional representational system, but the total abolition of the institution that is art. This is undoubtedly something “new,” but the newness is qualitatively different from both a change in artistic techniques, and a change in the representational system. (Bürger, 62)
Based on Bürger’s argument, we can analyze the original critical response to creacionismo on both sides of the Atlantic—whether with passionate enthusiasm in Spain or with a rather ironic sense of puzzlement in Chile—as constituting in each instance a different reaction to Huidobro’s particular break with “the traditional representative system” characteristic of the historical avant-garde. Throughout Huidobro’s career, creacionismo emerged and developed as a highly idiosyncratic and personal attempt to reconstitute poetry as a traditional system of representation through what Huidobro thought to be the next logical stage of poiesis as the universal principle of creation. Most of the scholarship on Huidobro since the 1970s has traditionally analyzed creacionismo in relation to the changes in the representational system generated by cubism. Influential Huidobro scholars such as René de Costa and Enrique Caracciolo-Trejo have essentially conceptualized Huidobro’s avant-garde poetics as a form of literary cubism. As Caracciolo-Trejo suggests, due to Huidobro’s contact and friendship with key cubist painters—especially with Juan Gris—Huidobro was exposed to and greatly influenced by the main tenets of cubism:
Una vecinidad temporal y de amistad con algunos de sus exponentes más notables, pone a Huidobro muy cerca del Cubismo. En efecto, aunque el Cubismo nace como tendencia exclusivamente plástica, propone también una liberación de las leyes naturales. En su plano específico, niega la representabilidad fotográfica de la realidad, busca la unicidad de sujeto-objeto, elude el artificio de la perspectiva, presenta, simultáneamente, perfiles que se establecen desde puntos de observación móviles. . . . El Cubismo propone entonces una “relectura” del mundo que los sentidos perciben y un nuevo lenguaje capaz de expresar esa experiencia. (Caracciolo-Trejo, 44)
A temporal proximity and friendship with some of its most notable exponents places Huidobro extremely close to cubism. In fact, although cubism is born as an exclusively plastic tendency, it also purports a liberation from the laws of nature. On a specific level, it negates the photographic representability of reality, looks for the univocity of subject and object, eludes the artifice of perspective, and simultaneously presents outlines from moving viewpoints. . . . Cubism thus proposes a “re-reading” of the sensorial world and a new language able to express this experience.
There is no doubt that creacionismo entails a critique of the traditional system of representation parallel to the one Bürger ascribes to cubism—i.e., “it calls into question the system of representation with its linear perspective that had prevailed since the Renaissance” (Bürger, 109). However, the critical use of the label of “literary cubism” to analyze Huidobro’s project based on his personal proximity to certain cubist artists or a parallel problematization of the “representability of reality” fails to account for the transatlantic tension at the very core of his avant-garde poetics, in what amounts to a characteristically Eurocentric conception of both the avant-garde in general, and the place and role of Huidobro’s creacionismo within it in particular.4 In fact, Huidobro’s conception of creacionismo clearly transcends the particular impact and influence of Parisian-based cubism on his project, from his early work published in Chile in the early 1910s, to his later and more influential work published in the early 1930s—roughly ten years after synthetic cubism had ceased being practiced by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. At the same time, and perhaps most importantly, the label of “literary cubism” to refer to creacionismo fails to account for Huidobro’s idiosyncratic reconceptualization of the creative act, as well as his reformulation of the notion of poiesis as the principle for poetic creation. In what follows, I examine the ways in which Huidobro’s early poetic ambitions proved to be not only fruitful for the creation of an original and influential avant-garde poetics that aimed at the reconceptualization of poetry as a system of representation but also led to the production of a series of astonishing avant-garde poems that still deserve their full critical recognition within studies of modern poetry, modernist poetics, and the avant-garde.
Through my analysis of the theoretical tenets of Huidobro’s creacionismo and their materialization in the bilingual poem Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel, I will show how Huidobro’s work is crucial for the study of avant-garde poetry and poetics in its transatlantic and transnational dimensions. Ultimately, I argue that Huidobro’s creacionismo unveils the very dynamics of translation, displacement, and replacement that, as analyzed by Puchner, lie at the core of the avant-garde as a form of “radical modernism” (Poetry of the Revolution, 174).
Huidobro’s Creacionismo: Intermediality and the Transferability of Poiesis
As Huidobro states as early as 1912, one of the main purposes of his career as a poet was to reformulate literature as a means of representation by recovering the creative potential of poiesis at the core of poetry: “El reinado de la literatura terminó. El siglo veinte verá el reinado de la poesía en el verdadero sentido de la palabra, es decir, en el de creación, como la llamaron los griegos, aunque jamás lograron realizar su definición” (“El creacionismo,” Obras Completas, 672; The realm of literature has ended. The twentieth century will see the realm of poetry in the true sense of the word, that is, that of creation, as the Greeks called it, although they never accomplished the realization of its definition). From the beginning of his career as a poet, creacionismo essentially emerged as a poetic search for an absolute form of the “true sense” of poetry itself. Huidobro’s poetic project represents an avant-garde critique of literature as a traditional system of linguistic representation whose aim it was to replace a hegemonic artistic tradition by exploring the poietic creative potential at the core of modern poetry. Creacionismo as the “true sense” of poetry would constitute poetry as not merely a generic literary form but rather as a new stage of its historical, formal, and ultimately logical development as a medium, according to Huidobro, “como continuación de la evolución lógica de la poesía” (as quoted in Costa, En pos de Huidobro, 54; as the continuation of the logical evolution of poetry). Huidobro’s creacionismo thus aims to re-create poetry based on the logic of its own creative purpose, that is, the creative evolution of the formal manifestation of poetry itself as its own logical end, as the Chilean poet argues here:
En mi modo de ver el “Creacionismo” es la poesía misma: algo que no tiene por finalidad, ni narrar, ni describir las cosas de la vida, sino hacer una totalidad lírica independiente en absoluto. Es decir, ella misma es su propia finalidad. (Cruchaca, “Conversando con Vicente Huidobro,” 63)
From my own perspective, I see creacionismo as poetry itself: something which does not have as its purpose to narrate, nor describe the things of life, but rather to create an absolutely independent lyrical totality. That is, poetry itself is its own purpose.
By conceiving the creative or poietic potential at the core of poetry as its very essence, Huidobro reformulates the institutionalization of the literary as conceptualized during European romanticism—a seminal event within Western literature and intellectual history. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have argued in The Literary Absolute, it is precisely during romanticism—as particularly conceptualized by early German romantics such as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel—when the notion of literature emerges as a radically new “genre” of writing: “They, in any case, will approach it [literature] explicitly as a new genre, beyond the divisions of classical (or modern) poetics capable of resolving the inherent ‘generic’ divisions of the written thing” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 10). More important, it is the very productive principle that the Jena romantics see at the core of literature as an intrinsically new (and modern) genre that precisely constitutes the same creative principle used by Huidobro to declare the death of literature as an institution, that is, the concept of poiesis. The groundbreaking critical analysis of early German romanticism carried out by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy helps clarify Huidobro’s own reformulation of poetry as medium, especially in relation to their critical reconsideration of the notion of “poiesy” as developed here:
The absolute in literature is not so much poetry (whose modern concept is also invented in Athenaeum fragment 116) as it is poiesy, according to an etymological appeal the romantics do not fail to make. Poiesy, or in other words production. The thought of the “literary genre” is thus less concerned with the production of the literary thing than with production, absolutely speaking. Romantic poetry sets out to penetrate the essence of poiesy, in which the literary thing produces the truth of production in itself, and thus, as will be evident in all that follows, the truth of the production of itself, of autopoiesy. . . . Romanticism is the inauguration of the literary absolute. (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 12)
If according to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, romanticism inaugurates the “generativity of literature” as an “infinitely new Work,” Huidobro’s creacionismo is evidently meant to represent powerfully its closing ceremony, while positioning his own creacionista poetics as a new manifestation and logical continuation of the same generative principle of poiesis that the early German romantics found at the core of the literary. Early German romanticism originally conceived the literary as a productive realm where particular works are related to an absolute Work of self-production due to the “infinite versability” of literature as a medium. The essential creative purpose of creacionismo, in contrast, is to articulate an absolute form of poiesis aiming at the production of a complete, harmonious, and unified poetic totality in itself by transferring radically diverse elements into the creacionista poem. As Cansinos-Assens writes, creacionismo formally operates as a poetics by creating a series of images in which differing elements are simultaneously fused together into the medium provided by the new creacionista “created” image:
La imagen creada es algo que no existe en la realidad, que se logra no amalgamando reminiscencias, sino uniendo en intuición vivaz atributos diversos e individuales que sólo pueden coexistir en la imaginación del poeta. De esta suerte, se obtiene una doble imagen que se presenta fundida en una sola, simultaneamente a la evocación del lector. (Cansinos-Assens, 270)
The created image is something that does not exist in reality and which is obtained not by amalgamating memories, but rather by uniting in vivid intuition diverse individual attributes that can only coexist in the poet’s imagination. In this manner, a double image is obtained which simultaneously presents itself to the evocation of the reader as being fused in one image.
Cansinos-Assens makes clear that Huidobro’s creacionismo manifests a dynamic in which individual words suffer a displacement and a reconfiguration of their original or standard linguistic forms that are translated into newly created poetic images “that do not exist in reality.” This transfer of different “individual attributes” provides the main rhetorical form for the figural correlation that leads to the creative generation of a new poetic image that can be experienced by the reader as a simultaneous complex.
Therefore, a key feature of creacionismo that still requires further analysis is what I will refer to as its intermedial dimension. I take intermediality in the context of Huidobro’s creacionismo to constitute both the incorporation of traditional linguistic and artistic media into the texture of the newly created work, as well as the creation of a new medium located between the particular material forms of traditional media. My use of the notion of the intermedial in this chapter is indebted to the critic who originally defined the concept, the New York–based artist and member of the Fluxus avant-garde collective Dick Higgins. Higgins defines the intermedial recurring to the tradition of English romanticism, in particular the work of Coleridge, in the following terms: “The vehicle I chose, the word ‘intermedia’ appears in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1812 in exactly its contemporary sense—to define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known” (Higgins, 27). Although Higgins uses the term borrowed from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria to describe various artistic forms belonging to different historical periods—from opera to visual or sound poetry, and from happenings to ready-mades—Higgins’s conception of the intermedial essentially constitutes a key component of his own theory of avant-garde art. Similar to Bürger’s conception of the avant-garde as a critique of art as an institution, the intermedial constitutes for Higgins a critique of traditional media that generally emerges in avant-garde artworks: “But when one is thinking of the avant-garde of forms and media, one is often thinking of artists who, for whatever reason, question those media” (29).
Huidobro thus developed a series of parallel and interconnected intermedial strategies that underscore the limitations of the literary as a medium of artistic expression and representation, while creating a new medium that tries to overcome the very traditional forms of literature he questions. This series of creacionista intermedial strategies as manifested in his work consist of both the incorporation of visual elements in Huidobro’s poetry—which includes his famous attempt to incorporate the medium of film in his avant-garde poetics—as well as his bilingual use of French and Spanish in the composition and publication of some of his major poems.5 As René de Costa recounts, from Huidobro’s compositions of the early 1910s, to his work produced in Paris at the end of the same decade, Huidobro’s creacionista poetics essentially incorporates the visual through different forms of calligrammatic poetry.6 While some of Huidobro’s early visual poems follow a pattern similar to that of the English metaphysical poet George Herbert—in which the typographic form of the poem becomes a crucial component for its meaning, such as Huidobro’s Triángulo armónico (1912) and La capilla aldeana (1913)—during his first stay in Paris, Huidobro moves to more complex and innovative forms of visual poetry. The evolution of Huidobro’s creacionista experimentation with visual elements reaches a greater level of complexity in 1922, when in a gallery exhibit of his artwork, Huidobro introduces his “poèmes-peints,” a series of complex visual poems or poetic paintings such as Kaleidoscope, in which the visual and textual elements of the composition produce a dynamic and hybrid whole functioning as autonomous intermedial pieces.
Figure 4. Vicente Huidobro’s “Matin” from Horizon Carré (1917). Courtesy of Fundación Vicente Huidobro, Santiago de Chile.
A good example of this new creacionista form is Huidobro’s “Matin”—included in his seminal collection Horizon carré (1917)—in which the lines of the poem unfold as a series of different visual objects, constituting what de Costa refers to as a “poema-dibujo” (poem-drawing). What is particularly interesting about “Matin”—a poem originally dedicated to Jean Cocteau—is the way Huidobro articulates a morning Parisian scene by framing the poem with the word “soleil,” in fact suggesting the perimeter of the sun as a square within which the action of the poem unfolds as a “scene.” Moreover, side by side with the main “French” images of the poems (the “tour Eiffel,” the “coq à trois couleurs,” and “La Seine,”) framed by these four “soleil” as suggesting an image of the sun, Huidobro inserts the foreign figure of the “Obélisque” that has forgotten its “Egyptian words” when transplanted into the French capital (“it hasn’t bloomed this year”): “Et l’Obélisque / Qui a oublié les mots égyptiens / Na pas fleuri cette année.”
As evident here, a key aspect of the intermedial nature of Huidobro’s creacionismo from his arrival in Paris in 1916, also evident in “Matin,” is the use of French in his poetic compositions. As Gerardo Diego points out, apart from being somewhat of an offense to his “native” or “putative” literary tradition in Spanish, Huidobro’s use of the French language crucially marks his overall attempt to arrive not so much at a merely bilingual poetics as at a universal form of creative expression:
Huidobro sentía tan hondo la atracción de Paris y el arte moderno, que pasa en Montmartre y Montparnasse lo mejor de su juventud y que durante algunos años abandona su idioma natal, para adoptar el francés como lengua más bien esencial, universal o telegráfica, de sus poemas creacionistas. Este que a tantos se le antoja pecado imperdonable, no lo es dentro de una estética, de una poética como la suya, en que el idioma sólo cuenta en lo que tiene de interior o creador, y no en lo fónico, castizo o sintáctico. (Diego, “Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948),” 20)
Huidobro felt so deeply the attraction of Paris and of modern art that he spent the prime of his youth in Montmartre and Montparnasse. During a few years he abandoned his native tongue in order to adopt French almost as an essential language—universal or telegraphic—for his creacionista poems. This linguistic adoption, deemed by many people an unforgivable sin, does not constitute such within his own aesthetics and poetics, in which language plays a role only in its inner or creative dimension, and not in its phonic, characteristically local, or syntactical features.
A crucial feature of Huidobro’s use of French as a linguistic medium related to these creacionista implications of universal creation is that creacionismo never ceased to constitute an intermedial and interlingual poetic practice. However, contrary to Diego’s characterization of Huidobro’s use of French as “abandoning” his native tongue, Huidobro embraced his own linguistic and cultural distance from the French language as a foreign space—productive but also problematic—where creacionismo could potentially take root, similar to his Egyptian “Obélisque” in “Matin,” by allowing him to detach and separate his own poetic practice and creations from their “putative origins,” that is, the Spanish language and the Latin American literary tradition that preceded him.
It is precisely through his own translational and displaced position in relation to French as an intermedial and nonnative medium for his poetics that its actual “foreignness” to Huidobro and his particular Latin American origins could add a significant planetary dimension to his poetry. My own use of the notion of the “planetary” in the context of Huidobro’s creacionismo is indebted to the groundbreaking use of the term by Wai Chee Dimock in her essay “Literature for the Planet,” in which she conceives literature in planetary terms as “an artificial form of ‘life’—not biological like an organism or territorial like a nation but vital all the same, and durable for that reason. Its receding and unfolding extensions make it a political force in the world” (175). The great importance of Dimock’s work for my analysis of Huidobro’s creacionismo as an intermedial and interlingual poetics resides in the fact that literature, for Dimock, when comprehended on a planetary scale constitutes a “linguistic continuum” that “urges on us the entire planet” (175). When we apply Dimock’s conception of planetary literature to Huidobro’s reconceptualization of poetry as a medium, the French language emerges as a foreign tongue able in itself to incorporate poiesis on a planetary scale beyond the spatiotemporal and geopolitical constraints imposed by Huidobro’s specific origins, that is, his language (Spanish), nation (Chile), and even continent (the Americas). Dimock similarly acknowledges the importance of the “presence of a foreign tongue” in her planetary approach to literature, pointing to what she refers to as a “not fully rationalized” space and time beyond the nation, as she argues here:
For the presence of a foreign tongue—the meaningfulness of that tongue—already suggests a counterpoint to the entity called the nation, showing up its limits, its failure to dictate an exact match between the linguistic and the territorial. . . . It points to dimensions of space and time not fully nationalized because not fully rationalized, space and time not conforming to an official number, not integrated by a unified metric. (Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 177)
Therefore, at the core of Huidobro’s poetic use of French lies a conception of the creacionista event as being in itself a translatable phenomenon that could achieve its intended planetary universality precisely as it is expressed and conveyed in different languages. In this sense, Huidobro’s creacionismo aimed at the poetic manifestation of an autonomous creative force that by being partly independent of its linguistic medium could potentially be universally transferable to any language and culture of the entire planet, as described by Saúl Yurkievich in the following terms:
Practica una poesía de viajeros poliglotas, de trotamundos a escala planetaria. Insiste además en la naturaleza mental del fenómeno poético, creación autónoma que tiene una vida independiente del medio lingusitico que la transmite. La poesía es, según Huidobro, completamente transferible de una a otra lengua. (Yurkievich, 75)
He practices a poetry of polyglot travelers, of planetary globetrotters. He insists, moreover, on the mental nature of the poetic event, as an autonomous creation endowed with a life independent of its linguistic medium. According to Huidobro, poetry is completely transferable from one language to another.
One of the key and previously unacknowledged aspects of the transferability of poiesis as a creative principle at the core of Huidobro’s conception of creacionismo is that it leads to a particularly problematic theory of translation. Referring again to Bürger’s theory of the historical avant-garde, the creacionista image entails a change not in the means of representation but rather in the system of representation; that is, it constitutes a systematic reconfiguration of the created event as a new translatable medium. Therefore, as a created “thing,” the creacionista event is as concrete and complete in itself as any other created object available in nature, according to Huidobro. Hence, within Huidobro’s avant-garde theory of translation, the created poetic image as a new event is essentially deemed universal regardless of the particular language used to express it.
This idea at the core of creacionismo is emphasized by Huidobro in the short manifesto included as a prologue to Horizon carré (1917): “Faire un poeme comme la nature fait un arbre” (To make a poem as nature makes a tree). Moreover, the transferability of the creacionista event is precisely expressed by Huidobro in what constitutes perhaps his most important theoretical analysis of the act of interlingual translation included in one of his key creacionista manifestos.
Si para los poetas creacionistas lo que importa es presentar un hecho nuevo, la poesía creacionista se hace traducible y universal, pues los hechos nuevos permanencen idénticos en todas las lenguas.
Es difícil y hasta imposible traducir una poesía en la que domina la importancia de otros elementos. No podeís traducir la música de las palabras, los ritmos de los versos que varían de una lengua a otra; pero cuando la importancia del poema reside ante todo en el objeto creado, aquél no pierde en la traducción nada de su valor esencial. De este modo, si digo en francés:
La nuit vient des yeux d’autrui
o si digo en español:
La noche viene de los ojos ajenos
o en inglés:
Night comes from others eyes
el efecto es siempre el mismo y los detalles lingüísticos secundarios. La poesía creacionista adquiere proporciones internacionales, pasa a ser la Poesía, y se hace accesible a todos los pueblos y razas, como la pintura, la música o la esculptura. (Huidobro, “El creacionismo,” 674)
If what is important to creacionista poets is to present a new event, creacionista poetry becomes translatable and universal, since any new event remains identical in all languages. It is difficult and nearly impossible to translate a poetry dominated by the importance of other elements. One cannot translate the music of words, the rhythms of the verses which vary from one language to another; but when the relevance of the poem resides overall in the created object, this object does not lose any of its essential value in its translation. Thus, if I say in French:
La nuit vient des yeux d’autrui
or if I say in Spanish:
La noche viene de los ojos ajenos,
or in English:
Night comes from others eyes
the effect is always the same and the linguistic details are secondary. Creacionista poetry acquires international dimensions, it becomes Poetry, and it is accessible to all nations and races, as is painting, music, and sculpture.
As described here, Huidobro’s theory of translation is articulated by the same logic that pervades his avant-garde poetics. It is thus a theory grounded on a creative force that aims to produce a new form of poiesis that by “becoming Poetry” through the intermedial and interlingual medium of Creacionsimo could acquire planetary “international dimensions” and be “accessible to all nations and races” beyond the spatiotemporal and historical constraints of specific origins. Related to this planetary dimension to creacionismo, Huidobro considers particular linguistic elements, such as the tone or rhythm of the original, not only secondary, but more important, extraneous to the creacionista event. What is important for Huidobro regarding translation is that it constitutes a linguistic process that unveils what he considers to be the transnational and translingual dimensions of the created image, itself a direct product of creation and not exclusively dependent on the actual linguistic form this image may have in a particular language. The act of interlingual translation is in this sense extremely relevant, since for Huidobro it reveals how the same creacionista image can be produced in different languages and experienced by different peoples, regardless of the fact that as a poetic image it must necessarily be different in each particular language. In a way, the interlingual and intermedial space of creation opened by the act of translation corroborates the planetary aspect of Huidobro’s project in its inherent drive to move beyond its putative linguistic origins. As Dimock mentions regarding her planetary conception of literature, translation “unsettles the native tongue” and “alienates it, puts it into perspective, throws it into a linguistic continuum more turbulent and more alive than the inert lines of a geopolitical map” (Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 176).
Creacionismo as a poetics enacts, then, a transformation of the literary medium (in any language) by transferring particular words into new created images that are reconstituted as a new series of translatable created objects.7 In the hands of Huidobro, poetry as a medium previously determined by the linguistic features of a particular language (Spanish or French in his case) transforms into a planetary realm of higher purposiveness available to all languages, peoples, and races. This transformation recalls Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the linguistic transformation experienced by the original in the act of translation, as “the unfolding of a special and high form of life,” as he argues here:
The relationship between life and purposiveness, seemingly obvious yet almost beyond the grasp of the intellect, reveals itself only if the ultimate purpose toward which all the individual purposivenesses of life tends is sought not in its own sphere but in a higher one. All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of their significance. Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another. (Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 255)
Benjamin’s conception of a higher purposiveness made available through the act of translation—as representing the significance of languages to each other—is parallel to the higher purposiveness that Huidobro sees at the heart of the creacionista poetic image. Huidobro develops his most sophisticated theoretical articulation of this notion in a lecture titled “La poesía,” given in Madrid in 1921 and published as the foreword to Temblor de cielo ten years later. In “La poesía,” Huidobro argues that there is a deeper or “magical” mode of signification that is able to break up, displace, and transform the merely communicative function of language. The main objective of Huidobro’s quest toward a universal and planetary form of poetry is to elevate the reader into a realm of aesthetic experience that transcends the merely communicative purpose of the grammatical and linguistic features of a particular language:
Aparte de la significación gramatical del lenguaje, hay otra, una significación mágica, que es la única que nos interesa. Uno es el lenguaje objetivo que sirve para nombrar las cosas del mundo sin sacarlas fuera de su calidad de inventario; el otro rompe esa norma convencional y en él las palabras pierden su representación estricta para adquirir otra más profunda y como rodeada de un aura luminosa que debe elevar al lector del plano habitual y envolverlo en una atmósfera encantada. (Huidobro, Temblor de cielo, 7)
Apart from the grammatical signification of language, there is another, a magical signification which is the only one that interests us. One is the objective language that is used to name things in the world without displacing them beyond their status as inventory. The other one breaks this conventional norm and, within it, words lose their strict representational value in order to obtain a deeper one, surrounded by a luminous aura that must elevate the reader beyond the realm of the habitual in order to enfold him or her in an enchanted atmosphere.
Just as Benjamin critiques the communicative dimension of language in “The Task of the Translator” through his notion of “pure language” to reveal the higher “purposiveness” of translation, so, too, does Huidobro endow creacionismo as a creative process with a higher linguistic purposiveness.
Thus, the language of creacionsita poetry emerges as a creative mechanism for encountering a realm of linguistic experience that is immanent in objective reality by essentially transforming the way the poietic, as the embodiment of creation, is named and takes shape within the poem. This process constitutes not so much a transformation of words themselves as their relocation through a transferential association with other words into a medium where the poet, as in Benjamin’s conception of the task of the translator, can establish anew a form of correspondence between poetic images. More particularly, Huidobro conceives the higher purposiveness immanent in language as an infinite potential of “certeza” (certainty) facilitated by the created word once it is located within the new intermedial space between “lo que vemos” (what we see) and “lo que imaginamos” (what we imagine), as he describes here:
En todas las cosas hay una palabra interna, una palabra latente y que está debajo de la palabra que las designa. Esa es la palabra que debe descubrir el poeta. . . . Su vocabulario es infinito porque ella no cree en la certeza de todas sus posibles combinaciones. Y su rol es convertir la probabilidad en certeza. Su valor está marcado por la distancia que va de lo que vemos a lo que imaginamos. (Huidobro, Temblor de cielo, 7)
Everything contains an inner word, a latent word that lies underneath the word designating it. That is the word which the poet must discover. . . . Its vocabulary is infinite because it does not believe in the certainty of all its possible combinations. And its role is to turn probability into certainty. Its value is marked by the distance that goes from what we see to what we imagine.
The creacionista poetic practice, therefore, aims at unveiling the “latent word” underneath words that can only be found when relocated into the creative space of poiesis lying at the interstices that separate the realms of objective reality and the creative imagination. This space, revealed by the poet through the discovery and establishment of previously unknown correspondences between words into a particular formal correlation, enables a series of complex poetic images to emerge within the poem. It is through a process of poetic transfer that Huidobro’s new form of poiesis is unveiled, moving poetry closer to a state that for Huidobro can resemble in its purest form the language of absolute creation. Ultimately, the role of the poet in triggering this process of creation by relating through the language of poetry “two distant realities” is discussed by Huidobro in his avant-garde manifesto titled “Manifiesto de manifiestos” as follows:
Yo agregaba entonces, y lo repito ahora, que el poeta es aquél que sorprende la relación oculta que existe entre las cosas más lejanas, los ocultos hilos que las unen. Hay que pulsar aquellos hilos como las cuerdas de un arpa, y producir una resonancia que ponga en movimiento las dos realidades lejanas. La imagen es el broche que las une, el broche de luz. (Huidobro, Obras Completas, 667)
I insisted then, and I repeat it now, that the poet is the person who finds out the occult relation that exists among things most distant, the hidden threads that unite them. Those threads must be played as the strings of a harp, and produce a resonance that puts in motion two distant realities. The image is the broche that joins them, the broche of light.
Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel: The Planetary Poiesis of Huidobro’s Creacionismo
Huibodro’s overall quest toward a planetary form of poiesis through creacionismo developed and circulated through new poetic manifestations as he continued traveling between Paris, Madrid, and Santiago de Chile during the 1920s. Although the basic premise of creacionismo remained the same—the rearticulation of poetry as a medium based on the creative principle of poiesis— Huidobro’s poetic practice gradually evolved into more complex versions of creacionismo that eventually led to the composition of the two seminal long poems published in Madrid during 1931, arguably the poetic culmination of his avant-garde project. These two poems are Altazor, which is generally regarded by critics to be Huidobro’s masterpiece, and the lesser-known prose poem titled Temblor de cielo, which was published in French in 1932 as Tremblement de ciel. As Huidobro’s constant travels across the Atlantic during the second decade of the twentieth century continued, creacionismo experienced a gradual process of aesthetic transfiguration and transformation, as Diego suggests here:
Juan Larrea, siempre clarividente, me decía en una carta muy de principios de nuestra fe creacionista, que el Creacionismo era para él, y suponía que para Huidobro un sentido total y distinto de la poesía (el mismo Vicente confiesa que acaso ya no es poesía sino otra cosa diferente de lo que con esa palabra se ha entendido siempre), un arte distinto que tendrá tras de su primitivismo y clasicismo, su romanticismo directamente deducido. Esto justamente es lo que sucede en la segunda etapa, entre 1925 y 1931, cuando Huidobro trabaja y concluye su Altazor, iniciado en 1919, y su Temblor de cielo, título tan chileno, en 1931. (Diego, “Poesía y Creacionismo de Vicente Huidobro,” 215)
Juan Larrea, always a clairvoyant, mentioned in a letter early in our creacionista faith that creacionismo constituted for himself, and he supposed for Huidobro too, a different sense of poetry in its totality, (Vicente himself confessed that it was not even poetry but something different from what has always been understood by that word), a different kind of art that after its primitive and classical periods, would have a romantic stage directly derived from them. This is precisely what happens in its second stage, between 1925 and 1931, when Huidobro works on and completes his Altazor, started in 1919, and Temblor de cielo—such a Chilean title—in 1931.
Diego’s brief but important characterization of Huidobro’s “second period” as the romantic stage of his earlier work clearly emphasizes the evolution of creacionismo as a poetics. At the same time, Diego points toward the series of formal and conceptual features that distance both Altazor and Temblor de cielo from Huidobro’s earlier creacionista poetry, which Diego defines as purer and more classical stages in the overall progression of Huidobro’s poetics. Although the most recent critical work on Huidobro’s poetry of the 1920s and 1930s focuses nearly exclusively on Altazor, Temblor de cielo has been generally ignored by literary scholars on both sides of the Atlantic since its publication in 1931. In what follows, I argue that Temblor de cielo culminates in what Diego defines as the “romantic” period of Huidobro’s creacionismo by narrativizing the epic quest for a poetic universality that lies at the core of his avant-garde project. Some of the poetic features of Temblor de cielo connected to Diego’s conceptualization of creacionismo’s later period as a romantic stage of his poetics emerge in the introduction to the 1957 anthology of Huidobro’s work edited by the critic Antonio de Undurraga. Undurraga refers to Temblor de cielo in the following terms:
No es Altazor el único poema largo de Huidobro. Temblor de cielo es el otro. En este texto, escrito en prosa, el hilo conductor es el amor, e Isolda, la mujer amada, una hermosísima creación huidobriana. Sin embargo, este hilo conductor no parece muy visiblemente, pues todo el poema está bañado de una luz negra y por un incontenible presentimiento de la muerte. Los objetos no permanecen estables, sino que tienden a monstruosas transformaciones. (Undurraga, “Teoría del creacionismo,” 201)
Altazor is not the only long poem by Huidobro. Temblor de cielo is the other one. In this text, written in prose, the main thread is love, and Isolde, the loved woman, an extremely beautiful Huidobrian creation. However, this thread does not appear fully visible, since the complete poem is bathed in a dark light and an irrepressible premonition of death. Objects don’t remain stable, but rather tend toward monstrous transformations.
As Undurraga mentions, Temblor de cielo has a basic narrative thread established by the relation of a male poetic voice and the character “Isolda” (“Isolde” in the French version), which was partially inspired by Wagner’s own Tristan und Isolde, as has been suggested by René de Costa.8 Whereas Isolda embodies the female principle of absolute beauty in the poem, the unnamed poetic voice constitutes an avant-garde version of the prototypical hero of medieval romance, who happens to be on an epic quest—literally here spanning across the entire cosmos—to encounter his female object of desire. Although the basic narrative structure of the poem appears relatively straightforward, the cosmic quest of the poetic voice is problematized by the “luz negra” (dark light) and the premonition of death that, as Undurraga describes, pervade Temblor de cielo. Moreover, the “transformación monstruosa” (monstrous transformation) that Undurraga discusses constitutes a pervading feature of the poem that continuously affects the logical stability of its poetic images.
In fact, in Temblor de cielo, Huidobro carries out a “monstrous transformation” not only of the myth of Tristan and Isolde, the main thread of the epic poem, but ultimately of creacionismo itself as an avant-garde poetics. This “monstrous transformation” is the result of Huidobro’s overall attempt to push the creative principle of poiesis at the core of creacionismo to its own logical and poetic extreme, that is, the notion of creation as a form of annihilation and death. Throughout Temblor de cielo, the relation between the poetic voice and Isolda is one of constant displacement and replacement, an impossible quest for an aesthetic ideal that keeps shifting and transforming itself, unexpectedly appearing as the narrative of the prose poem unfolds. This “monstrous” relation between both protagonists articulates the form of sexual love that embodies the productive principle of poiesis driving the narrative thread, which is intrinsically related to various destructive manifestations of death and annihilation. This paradoxical interrelation and interaction between sexual love and death is compellingly relevant in the following passage from Temblor de cielo, excerpted here both in its Spanish and French versions.
¿Quién ha sido el asesino?
Ante el juez está el cadáver de la mujer como la momia de la más bella faraona.
Gritad, acusadores.
. . .
De pronto un alarido ensordecedor se eleva en los aires.
—A la guillotina. La guillotina, la guillotina.
Momentos más tarde, cuando ante la muchedumbre sedienta de sangre, el cuchillo fatal cortaba la cabeza de mármol del acusado, un inmenso chorro de luz manaba de su cuello interminablemente.
Al mismo instante hubo en el cielo un espantoso terremoto. Se rompían las estrellas en mil pedazos, se incendiaban los planetas, volaban trozos de lunas, saltaban carbones encendidos de los volcanes de otros astros y venían a veces a clavarse chirriando en los ojos desorbitados de los hombres. . . .
* * *En medio de la catástrofe y de la confusión general unos brazos más poderosos que cien mares se apretaron en mi cuello.
—Isolda, ¿eres tú?
—Cuántos años lejanos el uno del otro.
—Se ha necesitado una hecatombe semejante para volver a encontrarnos.
—Tú, árbol de la sabiduría, con los ojos maduros en la puerta del sueño y ese andar de elefante con pies de ídolo.
—A ver tus senos. Muéstrame tus senos.
(Huidobro, Temblor de cielo, 153)9
Qui a été l’assassin?
Devant le juge est placé le cadavre de la femme, comme la momie de la plus belle pharaonne.
Criez, accusateurs.
. . .
Soudain, une clameur assourdissante s’éleva dans les airs
—A la guillotine! La guillotine, la guillotine!
Quelques moments plus tarde, quand devant la foule assoiffeé de sang le cocteau fatal trancha la têtê de marbre de l’acussé, un immense jet de lumiére jaillit de son cou interminablement.
Au même instant il y eût dans le ciel un épouvantable tremblement. Les étoiles se brisèrent en mille morceaux, les planètes prirent feu, des fragments de lunes volèrent, des charbons rouges sauterènt des volcans des autres astres et vinrent parfois se clouer pétillants dans le yeux désorbités des hommes. . . .
* * *Au milieu de la catastrofe et de la confusion générale deux bras plus puissants que cent mers étreignirent ma gorge.
— Iseult, Iseult, c’est toi?
Combien d’années nous avons été loin l’un de l’autre.
Il a fallu une hécatombe semblable pour se rencontre de nouveau.
Toi, arbre de la sagesse, avec les yeux mûrs à la porte du rêve, et cette démarche d’eléphant aux pieds d’idole.
— Montre-mois tes seins.
(Huidobro, Tremblement de ciel, 29)
These two passages in Spanish and French highlight the “monstrous” dimension—literally here as meaning “deviating from the natural” (OED)—of both Temblor de cielo and Tremblement de ciel. On one hand, the creative tension between sexual love and death—as well as between the poetic voice and Isolda—that pervades the entire poem opens up a creative space between the manifest and the latent, the imaginary and the real that is based on the conception of the principle of poiesis as a translatable force. In this sense, differing manifestations of death and chaos such as the beautiful cadaver of a woman, a maddening crowd, or the brutal execution of the assassin becoming a marble figure, give way to the appearance of Isolda as the object of sexual and erotic desire obsessively sought out by the poetic voice throughout the poem: “A ver tus senos. Muéstrame tus senos.” On the other hand, this “monstrous transformation” ultimately affects the stability of the principle of poiesis at the core of Huidobro’s creacionismo since it embodies the extremes of both creative love and deadly annihilation in the very form of the poem.
What is particularly relevant about this “monstrous transformation” of the principle of poiesis into its next logical stage—i.e., now as both a principle of production and annihiliation—is that it is intrinsically connected to the planetary dimensions of Huidobro’s poetic project in Temblor de cielo. Thus, in the poem, the entire cosmos constitutes the spatiotemporal realm able to contain the poietic relation between opposite creative forces, representing the absolute limit for the expansion of the principle of poiesis at the core of creacionismo. As Huidobro argues in “La poesía,” a manifesto from 1921 that was included in the first edition of Temblor de cielo, any poetry that he deemed valid for his creacionista purposes must move precisely toward this absolute horizon beyond contradiction “where extremes touch.”
Toda poesía válida tiende al último límite de la imaginación. Y no sólo de la imaginación, sino del espíritu mismo, porque la poesía no es otra cosa que el último horizonte, que es, a su vez, la arista en donde los extremos se tocan, en donde no hay contradicción ni duda. (Huidobro, Altazor; Temblor de cielo, 10)
All valid poetry moves toward the ultimate limit of the imagination. And not only of the imagination, but of spirit itself, because poetry is nothing but the last horizon, that is, at the same time, the edge where extremes touch and where there is neither doubt nor contradiction.
As shown in the bilingual fragment from Temblor de cielo quoted previously, the dynamic between love and death articulates an extremely relevant poetic manifestation of Huidobro’s notion of poetry as moving toward the “ultimate limit of the imagination.” In this sense, the key trope facilitating the unity and relation between the two extremes of poiesis throughout the poem is the planetary creacionista image that gives the title to the poem, i.e., the concept of “temblor de cielo” in Spanish or “treblement de ciel” in French: “Al mismo instante hubo en el cielo un espantoso terremoto” / “Au même instant il y eût dans le ciel un épouvantable tremblement” (At the same time there was a horrifying earthquake in the sky). This bilingual creacionista image tries to embody the complex tension of opposite forces at the very heart of Huidobro’s creacionismo, which reaches in this prose poem its own absolute poietic limit and last cosmic horizon “where extremes touch.” Specifically, the planetary tension between the heavens and the earth embodied in Huidobro’s figure of “temblor de cielo” opens up a space of translatability in which extreme and opposite manifestations of poiesis are transferred into each other.
However, the poetic image of “temblor de cielo” or “tremblement de ciel” brings us directly to the problematic question of the translatability of the creacionista image that sustains the claims of universality of Huidobro’s avant-garde poetics. The problematic nature of Huidobro’s notion of the translatability of creacionismo, as well as with his theory of translation, resides in whether his creacionista poetics is ultimately translatable in different languages, since, as poetry, the creacionista image ultimately exists as determined by its particular linguistic expression. In other words, if according to Huidobro’s theory of translation the poetic images articulated by the words “temblor de cielo,” “tremblement de ciel” or “sky quake”—my own infelicitous English translation of Huidobro’s bilingual creacionista image—constitute the same universal created object, they can only do so as poetic images that are intrinsically bound to and determined by the linguistic particularities (syntactical, grammatical, or semantic) of the particular languages that articulate them. This is perhaps part of the reason why Huidobro may have chosen the Spanish word “temblor” instead of the word terremoto to produce a creacionista translation of the French “tremblement de ciel” in some of the passages of the poem—including its title—while not in others, such as the line from the passage quoted previously (“Al mismo tiempo hubo en el cielo un espantoso terremoto” [At that same time, there was a horrifying earthquake in the sky]).
Although Huidobro manages to provide a new and original form of poetry based on his creacionista rearticulation of poiesis in Temblor de cielo and Tremblement de ciel, the problematic aspect of his notion of the translatability of the creacionista image shows that despite its claims of universality, creacionismo as a new medium is still bound to and determined by some of the essential features of the traditional medium he is trying to replace, precisely the medium that the Jena romantics originally referred to as “literature.” Huidobro’s theoretical articulation of creacionismo fails to recognize that the creacionista image can only constitute a created object through the literary medium, and more importantly, by the notion of “absolute poiesis” that, as suggested by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, lies at the very core of the literary. However, by tapping into the poietic potential at the core of poetry, Huidobro indeed manages to open a space for a new manifestation of the infinite force of creation to emerge—a force that for the German romantics precisely lies at the core of literature as medium. As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue, the autopoietic dynamic of poiesis exceeds any attempt to confine it within a particular work, ultimately unveiling an immanent productive force of becoming that keeps transforming its own medium of expression by problematizing its distance from its very form, or, as they put it, by revealing its infinite potential of autoformation:
The process of absolutization or infinitization, the Process as such, exceeds—in every way—the general theoretical (or philosophical) power of which it is nonetheless the completion. The “auto” movement, so to speak—auto-formation, auto-organization, auto-dissolution, and so on—is perpetually in excess in relation to itself. And this, too, in a certain sense, was noted in Athenaeum fragment 116: “the romantic kind of poetry is still becoming; that is real essence, that it should forever be becoming and never perfected. No theory can exhaust it, and only a divinatory criticism would dare characterize its ideal.” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 92)
My final argument regarding Huidobro’s creacionismo is that it offers a radically avant-garde response to an essentially romantic (and modern) problem, that is, the drama precisely enacted in the poem of a poetic subjectivity struggling to articulate the relation between mind and nature, reality and representation through the power of the creative imagination. Part of the complex romantic nature of Huidobro’s Temblor de cielo and Tremblement de ciel is that, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue, poiesis as the principle of the literary absolute ultimately aggravates the drama of the subject due to the fact that it “infinitizes” the “thinking of totality” (Literary Absolute, 15). Ultimately, due to its very inexhaustability, the main power of poiesis lying at the core of the literary is, as they suggest, the annihilation of “all individualities”: “The Work must be nothing other than the absolutely necessary auto-production in which all individualities and all works are annihilated” (56). This seems precisely what is announced (with a difference) at the very end of Huidobro’s Temblor de cielo and Tremblement de ciel—the annihilation of subjectivities lost in the abyss of autoproduction that lies at the core of the poietic. However, as the last passage of the poem suggests, the main difference between Huidobro’s notion of poiesis and that developed during early German romanticism as conceptualized by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy is the concept of the planet, which ultimately encapsulates and embodies for Huidobro what they define as the “process of absolutization or infinitization, the Process as such” of the creative poeisis of creacionismo.
Señoras y señores: la culebra de los naufragios se muerde la cola y se agranda, se agranda, hasta el infinito. Adentro de sus círculos estamos nosotros sorbidos por el abismo de la futura podredumbre, arrojando pus por nuestros ojos como espumas de playas. En tanto, los paisajes internos, sienten el vuelo de los árboles, nuestros oídos antes de despegarse y caer como hojas, alcanzan a oír el torbellino de las espigas que se ahondan. No hay esperanza de reposo. En vano el esqueleto detrás de su vidrio toma la actitud hierática del que va a cantar. Las puertas internas del planeta se cubren los oídos con violencia como el enfermero que oye los alaridos de la terrible aventura en la última frontera. Nada se gana con pensar que acaso detrás de la muralla abstracta se extiende la zona voluptuosa del asombro. [ . . . ]
Así fue el discurso que habéis llamado macabro si razón alguna, el bello discurso de presentador de la nada.
Pasad. Seguid vuestro camino como yo sigo ahora.
Soy demasiado lento para morir. (Huidobro, Altazor; Temblor de cielo, 172)10
Mesdames et Messieurs, la couleuvre des naufrages se mord la queue et s’agrandit, s’agrandit jusqu’à l’infinit. Nous sommes là en dedans de ses cercles, aspirés par la abime de la future pourriture, rendant nous pus par nos yeux, comme écume des plagues. En même tempes les paysages internes sentent l’envolve des arbres, nos oreilles avant de se decoller et tomber comme des feuilles, parviennet à entendre le tourbillon des épis qui s’approfondissent. Il n’y a pas d’espoir de repos. En vain le squelette derrière sa vitre prend l’attitude hiératique de celui qui va chanter. Les portes internes de la planète se couvrent les oreilles avec violence comme l’infirmier qui entend les clameurs de la terrible aventure à l’ultime frontière. On ne gagne rien à penser que peut-être derrièrre la muraille abstraite s’éntend la zone voluptueuse de l’étonnement. [ . . . ]
Tel fut le discourse que vous avez appelé macabre sans aucune raison, le beau discours du présenteur du néant.
Passez. Suivez votre chemin comme je suis le mien.
Je suis trop lent à mourir. (Huidobro, Tremblement de ciel, 59)
A tragic conclusion to the drama of the modern subject indeed, but one that, as powerfully envisioned and acknowledged by Huidobro at the end of Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel, constitutes perhaps the key inescapable moment of planetary poiesis in the poem. As shown in this chapter, although his avant-garde poetic project manages to tap into the same poietic principle of the literary event originally explored and theorized during early German romanticism, a crucial aspect of Huidobro’s avant-garde poetics is the way in which it unveils the poietic as a new principle of creation aimed at reaching all nations and races on a planetary scale. Huidobro’s avant-garde rearticulation of the romantic drama between mind and nature ultimately aims at bridging through the created poem the minds of readers separated by “distancias inconmensurables” (insurmountable distances). The poietic bridging of these insurmountable distances is intrinsically connected to the “foreign” intermedial space of creation and translation at the heart of the dynamic of displacements and replacements inherent in Huidobro’s own transatlantic experience, as the following words suggest:
El poeta representa el drama angustioso que se realiza entre el mundo y el cerebro humano, entre el mundo y su representación. El que no haya sentido el drama que se juega entre la cosa y la palabra, no podrá comprenderme.
El poeta conoce el eco de los llamados de las cosas a las palabras, ve los lazos sutiles que se tienden las cosas entre sí, oye las voces secretas que se lanzan unas a otras palabras separadas por distancias inconmensurables. [ . . . ] Allí coge ese temblor ardiente de la palabra interna que abre el cerebro del lector y le da alas y lo transporta a un plano superior, lo eleva de rango. (Huidobro, Temblor de cielo, 9)
The poet represents the anguished drama that takes place between the world and the human brain, between the world and its representation. Whoever has not felt the drama played by the thing and the word will not be able to understand me. The poet knows the echo between the callings of things to words, sees the subtle links established between things themselves, hears the secret voices that communicate words separated by insurmountable distances. . . . The poet obtains there the ardent tremor of the inner word that opens the mind of the reader and gives it wings, transporting the reader to a higher plane, raising its rank.
Through creacionismo, Huidobro unveils the power of poetry as a medium able to connect readers at a planetary scale, beyond the spatiotemporal and linguistic limitations that have traditionally constrained literature. By placing the principle of poiesis at the interstices between different nations and continents, languages and media, the visible and the invisible, Huidobro articulates a radical avant-garde challenge to geopolitical boundaries and conceptual limits through what essentially amounts to an act of planetary reading. Throughout his work, and as examined in this chapter, Huidobro ultimately offers the readers of his creacionista poetic compositions a glimpse of what Dimock has suggestively defined as the “collective life of the planet,” as described here:
To yield to this centrifugal force is to yield to an onslaught of space and time, an onslaught unavoidably brutal, centered on no one nation and tendered to no one nation. . . . For if writing must end up being a form of translation (not always voluntary) from the here and now, it is reading that initiates that process. Reading ushers in a continuum that mocks the form of any finite entity. It mocks the borders of the nation, just as it mocks the life span of the individual. As a global process of extension, elaboration and randomization, reading thus turns literature into the collective life of the planet. Coextensive neither with the territorial regime of the nation nor with the biological regime of a single human being, this life derives its morphology instead from the motion of words: motion effected when borders are crossed, when a new frame of reference is mixed with an old, when foreign languages turn a native tongue into a hybrid. (Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 178)