Vicente Huidobro

Skyquake Vicente Huidobro

The prose-poem Temblor de cielo is more apparently unified work than its companion, Altazor, although this might owe more to its style of delivery: 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 Amunategui, the young woman who had become the poet's second wife. I tend to think that the central impetus for the work is an erotic storm occasioned by the second Mrs Huidobro, notwithstanding the artistic fusion with the other elements mentioned above. 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 Nacion: "Naci a los treinta y tres anos, el dia de la muerte de Cristo" [I was born at the age of thirty three, on the day Christ died]. (It should be noted that the author was 33 when he first met Ximena, which gives the imagery another dimension.)