Altazor, or The Parachute Journey

Vicente Widobro (1893–1948), the Chilean “Poet and Antipoet”, as he called himself, began to write his main work - a poem in the seven songs “Altasza Time, or Traveling with a parachute” - in 1919 and finished in 1931. This poem stands on a par with such outstanding samples of the Latin American avant -garde as the “place of residence is the land” of Pablo Neruda, the “trils” of Sesara Valiero and the “groans” of Pablo de Rocky. The hero makes a parachute jump from somewhere in space and in flight is experiencing something like a mystical experience. Either he meets fabulous and mythological characters, he experiences love-decline, deifying his beloved, or is fond of a verbal game, which ultimately leads to the creation of texts consisting of meaningless phrases and words of hybrids. He, as it were, invents a language in which only music remains. In Russian it is published for the first time. ”
From the preface of Ekaterina Khovanovich: “Having received an idea of ​​what Widro did with the language, Russian readers immediately say: Harms! Yes, and the Harms, and the steep, and the Khlebnikov ... and folklore. Remember: “The village was driving past a man ...”?