Satyr - Huidobro, Vicente

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Résumé :
Avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro was born into an aristocratic family in Santiago, Chile. He is known as the creator and exponent of the literary movement called Creationism (Creacionismo), which combined aspects of modernism with neo-platonism and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. After studying literature at the University of Chile, he lived in Paris for about ten years, where he associated with poets and artists such as Pablo Picasso, Guillame Apollinaire, and Pierre Reverdy. Huidobro returned to Chile in the mid-1920s, founded a number of magazines, and ran for the presidency of Chile, ultimately losing the campaign. His most definitive works are Altazor and Temblor de cielo (both 1931). He died in Cartagena, Chile in 1948, at the age of 56....

Biographie:
The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) is one of the most important figures in 20th-century Hispanic poetry and, with C?sar Vallejo, one of the pioneering avant-gardists in Spanish. Originally from an upper-class Santiago family, Huidobro was fortunate to have the means to support himself and his family while he found his artistic way. After an early phase writing in a quasi-symbolist style in his native city, he moved to Paris and threw himself into the local artistic milieu with a passion, quickly becoming a notable figure, publishing two full-sized collections and four chapbooks in 1917-18, and a French-language selected poems in 1921. Influenced initially by Apollinaire, Huidobro quickly befriended both forward-looking French writers such as Reverdy, Cocteau and Radiguet, and the Spanish expatriate artists, including Picasso and Juan Gris. He was to reach his artistic maturity in 1931 with the publication of two masterpieces: the long poem, Altazor, and the book-length prose-poem Temblor de cielo (Skyquake). Two further collections followed during his lifetime, both published in Santiago in 1941. While he also published successful novels and plays, it is for his poetry that he is best remembered today....

Sommaire:
Satyr is Huidobro's last novel, published in Santiago in 1939, at a time when little of his work was in print in his native land. While that situation would be rectified two years later, with the release of two major poetry collections, this volume is his final work in prose, and one that has mostly escaped attention since. Closer examination of the text reveals however that it contains a number of the author's literary, social, political and philosophical preoccupations, with many themes from his poems, essays, and manifestos re-occurring in the book, the protagonist of which, Bernardo Saguen, may be regarded on one level as a failed artist. This would-be writer is one that goes to the bad, and whose mental collapse - he seems to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia - and moral disintegration seem to parallel the kind of disintegration seen in some of the author's later poems. Written at a time when Huidobro was unsure of his literary position in Chile, the book is much concerned with the idea of poetic creation, while also worrying at the concept of reality, whether artistic creations are part of reality itself, and whether the artist himself is part of reality. As the novel proceeds, Saguen finds himself increasingly untethered from that reality as he has a nervous breakdown, only for his return to a measure of sanity and composure to coincide with horror, and then total mental collapse. The reader's sympathies lie with him at the outset, but we have only his word for the events that transpire...