Books by Vicente Huidobro

Huidobro published this collection of manifestos and statements on poetics in 1925, and it summed up the previous 8 or 9 years of his work. The truth is, however, that he was already moving away from some of the positions espoused in this volume, and it was one of his last original publications in French.

In 1931, Huidobro and Arp together wrote Tres novelas exemplares (Three Exemplary Novels), a set of wild quasi-surrealist "stories". In 1935, Huidobro offered the set to a publisher in Santiago, but was told that the book was too short, and so wrote two further solo stories. The contents are therefore not three, not huge and not novels.

Before attaining his poetic maturity - and this would be through poems written mostly in Spanish - Huidobro wrote these two collections in French and published them in Paris in 1925, the same year that a volume of his manifestos appeared (see below). The two books have never been republished in France, and only in collected editions in Chile.

In 1928, shortly after his marriage to Ximena Amunategui, and after meeting Douglas Fairbanks, Huidobro began writing his version of the Cid legend as a novel. The result is a highly readable version of the story, that casts aside the style of romantic 19th-century historical fiction in favour of more modern approaches and cinematic influences.

Cagliostro is a lurid tale of magic and secret societies during the reign of Luis XVI, centred on the figure of the Italian occultist Giuseppe Balsamo, known under his alias of Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. The book owes its style of presentation to the example of German expressionist cinema, of the kind exemplified by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

This selected edition presents an overview of all of Huidobro's work, from 1914 until 1948, moving from the early symbolist work, though the high avant-garde phase, then through the highpoint of his career with Altazor and Skyquake, and on into the late poetry which settles down into a post-vanguard style. Also includes manifestos and interviews.

Square Horizon is Huidobro's first book in French and is heavily influenced by the work of Apollinaire, but it marks the author's definitive arrival on the avant-garde scene in Paris, and kicks off a frenetic period of two years in which he published two full collections and four chapbooks.

Skyquake is a sustained lyric effusion of a kind that Huidobro had not previously produced, 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 book-length prose-poems on the thermos of love, sex and death.

Huidobro published Poemas articos in Madrid in 1918, this being the last of a rapid series of publications which established him as a major new talent both in French and in Spanish. The volume was his longest Spanish-language collection up to this point, and marks a significant breakthrough.