Sky-Quake

Tremor of Heaven

By Vicente Huidobro

1931

First Published

4.11

Average Rating

Number of Pages

2H54M

Audio Length

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Tony Frazer. The prose-poem TEMBLOR DE CIELO is more apparently unified work than its contemporary work, Altazor, although this might owe more to its style of an ecstatic outpouring of words that largely revolve around the themes of love, sex and death. The Isolde to whom much of the poem is addressed is an idealised feminine figure—part goddess, part idealised beloved, part Isolde from Wagner's opera (another ecstatic outpouring on the theme of love, sex and death) and part Ximena Amunátegui, the young woman who had become the poet's second wife. The poem is also a sustained lyric effusion of a kind that Huidobro had never produced before, and it marks the point at which his work moves on from the barnstorming avant-garderie of his younger years to a more mature style, albeit one influenced by surrealism, a movement which Huidobro had previously attacked. It is also the last time that Huidobro was to adopt the god-like narrative persona that occurs in his earlier work. In TEMBLOR, as in some earlier works, God is conflated with the poet-creator, as he is in Altazor, where the opening lines reflect the opening of a love-poem addressed to Ximena that the author published (to great scandal) in the Santiago newspaper, La Nación .

Avg Rating

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Author

Vicente Huidobro

Author · 12 books

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 ).