Profile of Vicente Huidobro on Famous Like Me

Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández (January 10, 1893 – January 2, 1948) was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He was an exponent of the artistic movement called Creacionismo ("Creationism"), which maintains the tenet that a poet must bring life to the things he or she writes about, rather than just describing them.

Huidobro was born in Santiago into a wealthy family. After spending his first years in Europe, he enrolled in a Jesuit secondary school in Santiago. He then studied literature at the University of Chile and published Ecos del alma (Soul's Echoes), 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").

In 1913, along with Carlos Díaz Loyola, he edited the three issues of the journal Azul, and published Canciones en la noche and La gruta y el silencio (The Cry and the Silence). The next year, he gave a lecture, Non serviam, which reflected his aesthetic creed. At the same time in another work, he explained his religious doubts and his criticisms of the Jesuits, which earned him reproaches in his family.

In 1916 he moved to Europe with his wife and children. While in Madrid, he met Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, with whom he had exchanged letters since 1914. He settled in Paris and published Adán (Adam), a work that began his initial period of artistic development. Huidobro met and mixed with most of the Parisian avant garde of this period: Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, Francis Picabia, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Paul Eluard and Blaise Cendrars.

In October of 1918 Huidobro traveled to Madrid, beginning a series of annual trips to that city. There he made contact with the artistic elite of Madrid and shared with them both his own Creacionismo and what he had learned from the Parisian vanguard. This would lead to yet another artistic movement, Ultraísmo. He corresponded with Tristan Tzara and collaborated with him on his Dadaist journal. The next year on another of his trips to Madrid, he brought with him a rough draft of what would eventually become his masterwork, Altazor.

He kept writing in Paris, but in 1921 in Madrid there appeared the first issue of Creación, an international journal of art, founded and edited by Huidobro, which included a Lipchitz sculpture and paintings by Georges Braque, Picasso, Gris and Albert Gleizes. The second issue was printed in Paris in November of that year, under the title Création Revue d'Art. In December he gave a famous lecture, La Poesía (Poetry), which served as prologue to his Spanish edition of Temblor de Cielo (Quake of Heaven).

He continued his multifarious artistic activities in Europe until 1925, when he moved back to Chile and began to edit and publish political journalism and criticism. Youthful supporters proclaimed him as their candidate for president. A bomb, however, exploded in front of his house; Huidobro was not hurt.

Back in Europe by the late 1920s, he began to write what would become his novel, Mío Cid Campeador. It was at this time that he discovered that he was heir to the marquisate of Casa Real. Meanwhile he continued his work on Altazor and began Temblor de Cielo.

Huidobro's master work is a series of poems called Altazor. Other works include Temblor de Cielo and Mio Cid Campeador.

Bibliography

Books

• The Poet is a Little God, by Vicente Huidobro, translated from Spanish by Jorge García-Gómez, with an Introduction by Gary Kern. Grand Terrace, CA: Xenos Books.

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