Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven by Vicente Huidobo (co-im-press, 2020), co-translated with Ignacio Infante

I’m very excited that co•im•press has published my co-translation (with Ignacio Infante) of Vicente Huidobo’s Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven. Huidobro published this electrifying long poem in Spanish in 1931 as Temblor de cielo and in French in 1932 as Tremblement de ciel. Handsomely designed as an invertible codex with two front covers, our book is the first trilingual edition of this important work from the historical avant-garde.

“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

~ by Michael Leong on March 18, 2020.