Handbook of Foams

Manual de espumas was published in 1924 and was one of the most important eruptions in the early phase of the 20th-century Spanish avant-garde. Heavily influenced by Vicente Huidobro and his theories of Creationism, the book is effectively the first Creationist volume by someone other than Huidobro himself, while also being the volume that carried the banner for Ultraism, Spain's first movement of the vanguardia. "Francisco Aragón's translation of Gerardo Diego's musical and sea-misted Handbook of Foams makes a valuable contribution to the study of Spain's Generation of '27 by expanding our understanding of its aesthetics and alliances beyond its most celebrated member, Federico García Lorca. With his introduction, Aragón usefully maps Diego's early poetic engagements to demonstrate the impact of Latin American poets, namely that of the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, on Handbook of Foams and, more generally, Spanish and European avant-garde poetry." -Rosa Alcalá "Lemons and planets, crickets and trains, kites and stars, consumptives and suicides; seaside panorama that "never waxes or wanes," but where the "wind awaits the hospital's opening hour." Both the structure of avant-garde feeling and the technique of composition that Gerardo Diego brought to his Handbook of Foams transfigure the plastic worldliness of bodies, things, and surroundings into a recital of the otherworldly, into stage lighting and sound effects that encompass at once "a corner of the countryside" and the crime scenes of modern life. Translator-poet Francisco Aragón has finely rendered into English the image principle unique to creacionista causation and Diego's particular recital of its ebb and flow." -Roberto Tejada