THE PRE-HISTORY OF ALTAZOR IN THE EARLY WORKS

Abstract

This article is a reading of Vicente Huidobro’s early works that examines how they anticipate the author’s poem, Altazor, published in 1931. In particular, it analyses how the linguistic, semantic and conceptual features of Huidobro’s inaugural texts laid the imaginative foundations on which both the figure of Altazor and the poem itself was to be constructed. This is an archeological reading of Huidobro’s work that establishes an Altazorian genealogy consisting of earlier incarnations of the figure of the poet who anticipate the mythic dimensions of Altazor. This genealogical analysis reveals not only a pre-history but a history of the text as a work in progress through a process of writing and re-writing. It is a process which gives the work its unique and original meaning, and which can also be seen as a complex projection of the writer in search of an identity.