/ The Translatability of Planetary Poiesis: Vicente Huidobro’s Creacionismo in Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different avant-garde groups in Paris (cubism) and in Madrid (ultraísmo) during the late 1910s and early 1920s. Although it partly emerged as a poetic correlative to the avant-garde revolution brought forth by such cubist painters as Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, Huidobro’s poetry is rooted in what constitutes primarily a romantic conception of the poetic word as endowed with a productive force to re-create itself infinitely and, consequently, to bring about a radical transformation of experience. Working with different approaches to avant-garde poetics developed by critics such as Peter Bürger and René de Costa, the chapter focuses on Huidobro’s long prose poem composed in 1928 and published in Madrid as Temblor de cielo (1931) and in Paris as Tremblement de ciel (1932). I show here how Huidobro’s crucial bilingual poem narrativizes his avant-garde theory of poetic language as a planetary quest for the aesthetic ideal of becoming that Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have called, in reference to the poetics of Early German romanticism, the “literary absolute.”