Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven
Vicente Huidobro
Translated by Ignacio Infante & Michael Leong
Trilingual Edition including original Spanish and French
Perfect Bound Trade Paperback, 134 pages, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-947918-03-0
Inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Vicente Huidobro’s Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven is a stunning prose poem driven by a relentless seismic energy that takes metaphor-making and image-building to unimaginable heights. Originally published in Madrid in 1931 under the title Temblor de cielo and in Paris in 1932 as Tremblement de ciel, this groundbreaking text stands as one of the most significant bilingual poems of twentieth-century letters. Part love poem, part surrealist narrative, and part philosophical treatise, Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven is intimately connected to Huidobro’s better-known masterwork Altazor (1931) and stands as a major achievement in Latin American avant-garde poetry, again proving Huidobro’s stature among the four giants of Chilean poetry, where he stands shoulder to shoulder with Nobel laureates Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, as well as his contemporary avant-gardist Pablo de Rokha. Released here for the first time in a trilingual edition with a translation that takes into account both the Spanish and French originals in its Englishing, Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven allows translators Ignacio Infante and Michael Leong to bring Huidobro’s dynamic and wildly inventive poetic flights to new readers with verve and savvy. Not for the faint of heart and not to be missed!
PRAISE FOR SKY-QUAKE: TREMOR OF HEAVEN
Mystical, cosmic, exuberant, boisterous, otherworldly, operatic, epic, outlandish. These are just some of the adjectives that apply to this multilingual masterwork of one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. The Gods and wars and ghosts inside Huidobro’s language explode off the page, creating an affective experience that is vertiginous, that makes the body and mind quake along with the sky, the word, the image. Huidobro is a singular writer, a legend of the global avant-garde. This sumptuous new translation is a tremendous service to contemporary poetry and to literary history.
—Daniel Borzutzky
PRAISE FOR VICENTE HUIDOBRO
Vicente Huidobro, the “citizen of oblivion”: he contemplates from such heights that everything turns to air. He is everywhere and nowhere: he is the invisible oxygen of our poetry.
—Octavio Paz
REVIEWS
Reading in Translation "On Sex and Death: Vicente Huidobro's Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven, Co-translated from Spanish by Ignacio Infante and Michael Leong" reviewed by Gabrielle Martin
Rain Taxi "Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven" reivewed by John Bradley
