Skyquake

Temblor de cielo was written in 1928. A more unified work than its contemporary, Altazor-although published in 1931, that work was longer in gestation-this might owe more to its style of delivery: an ecstatic outpouring of words that largely revolve around the themes of love, sex and death. The Isolde to whom much of the poem is addressed is an idealised feminine figure-part goddess, part idealised beloved, part Isolde from Wagner's opera and part Ximena Amunátegui, the young woman who had become the poet's common-law wife. The poem is also a sustained lyric effusion of a kind that Huidobro had never produced before, 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 movement which Huidobro had previously attacked. This second edition contains some textual revisions, but also adds the author's French version of the work, also with facing English text. The two versions differ here and there, but rarely significantly, and it is not at all certain which version was composed first. The French text was first published in 1932, a year after the Spanish version.