1

The Traitor, the Translator and the Hero:

From Huidobro to Weinberger
Cristin Gmez O.
(presentation for XXXVII
Congress of Instituto Internacional
De Literatura IberoAmericana, Puebla,
Mexico, June 2008)

The first time Eliot Weinberger decided to translate Huidobro, it was at the behest of
Emir Rodrguez Monegal, in order to include that translation in Monegals Borzoi
Anthology of Latin American Literature (1977). But that occasion Weinberger only
translated the third Canto. Then, after a request from David Guss, he worked with the
canto IV to be published in a Huidobros anthology in 1981.
Later on, as just one small step in the path that Weinberger has been covering
altogether with the poet of Altazor (1931), our translator would take on the enterprise of
translating the complete text of Altazor, now at the request (and helped by) the Chilean
poet Cecilia Vicua. Faithfull to his own views about this topic, Weinberger has
translated once and again the same poem, starting from the scratch the undefinitive
translation of one text that no too long ago did not have a definite text either. Suspicion
about Altazor remain till today, even though professor and renowned poet Andrs
Morales has achieved a remarkable work of philology and scholarship in order to
establish a final version of Huidobros text with Altazor de puo y letra (1999). In the
Introduction to his translation of 2004, Weinberger itself explains why this is so,
It is still not known what language the poem was written in.
Fragments were first published in magazines in French; the

2
book ultimately in Spanish. The nightingale of the poem,
whose middle syllable runs through the musical scale, is
not a Spanish ruiseor but a French rossignol made Spanish:
rosiol. Thus the original of this untranslatable poem may
itself be a translation. (XII)
Among his own tenets for the translation process, Weinberger established a set of
rules, very interesting ones some of them, that can help us to understand his reading of
Huidobro and, also to separate it from others that consider Altazors voyage as an
existential failure, like Icarus who reaches its highest point acknowledging its defeat.
So lets start with some of those issues that Weinberger points out about translation.
He might not use these same words, but the first rule indicates that the translator must
highly appraise humility as part of his labor. Even if Weinberger shares the need to
recognize the translation process as a genre with its own normative and statutes (as he
also does in regard the labour demands of translators as paid workers), he stresses that A
translation is based on the dissolution of the self. A bad translation is the insistent voice
of the translator (Outside Stories, 60). This is not just about how modest Weinberger
could be, but a proposal about writing and its meaning. Namely: many of Weinbergers
views about translating, are aimed to put aside any consideration of faithfullness, any
attempt to make prevail the original upon the translated text. The original is never better
than the translation. The translation is worse than another translation, written or not yet
written, of the same original (60), writes Weinberger, showing he is in tune with the
contemporary tendencies in the field.
His distrust of the translator entangled with academic erudition pursues the same
goal. Overseers of every translation, the faculty of Foreign Language Departments,
according to Weinberger, they always emphasize in the more or less accuracy of any

3
translated text to the original one, wether is right or awfully wrong to translate lecho as
milk (as once actually happened to a very sorrow Neruda). But more often than not,
they blatantly lack of any knowledge of the poetry written in the language in which the
text will be translated to. Conversely to that clich that argues that the best poetry
translators are almost exclusively the poets themselves, for Weinberger
The only good translators are avid readers of contemporary poetry
in the translation-language. All the worst translations are done by experts
in the foreign language who know little or nothing about the poetry
along-side which their translations will be read. Foreign-language
academics are largely concerned with semantical accuracy, rendering
supposedly exact meanings into a frequently colorless or awkward
version of the translation-language. They often write as though the entire
twentieth century had not occurred. () They champion the best-loved
poet of Ruthenia, but never realize that he sounds in English like bad
Tennyson. Poets (or poetry readers) may be sometimes sloppy in their
dictionary-use, but they are preoccupied with what is different in the
foreign author, that which is not already available among writers in the
translation-language, how that difference may be demonstrated, and how
the borders of the possible may be expanded. Bad translations provide
examples for historical surveys; good translations are always a form of
advocacy criticism: here is a writer one ought to be reading and here is
the proof. (en Balderston, Daniel y Schwartz, Marcy E. (editors). Voiceovers, 112)
I have used this long quote due to illustrates various aspects that will allows, now, to
study the Weinbergers translation of Altazor. Before to proceed, I would to call the
attention into what seems to be a small but decisive contradiction of this translator and
also theoretician of translation. One of the principles that Weinberger considers to be of
the utmost importance is the one claiming that a poem translated into English should not
sound as one originally written in English. Once and again, interspersed in different
publications related to the topic, Weinberger repeats this sentence: A translation that
sounds like a poem in English is usually a bad translation. (Outside Stories, 59)
However, this formula has some nuances and they also have their own justification.

4
Weinberger itself explicites the nuances, from the very moment when he discusses that
the reading of a translated text generates a specific kind of distance (59): for him, there
is a voluntary interruption in the reader of the implicit agreement among him/her and the
author, so he/she does not forget not pne split second s/he is reading a translation, not an
original text. Further on we will examine more closely this statement. By the present
time, one other of those nuances that I wanted to point out is the fact that Weinberger is
always talking about texts translated into English, a language for whose readers a work
coming from a foreign language it might become exotic-I am using exactly the same
term than the author of Outside Stories. It looks like Weinberger is echoing Lawrence
Venuti, since this other theoretician arguments that the translated text should keep visible
that exoticism instead of domesticate it, so as to do not just vertirlo simplemente en
moldes familiares for the second language readers.
On this particular point, Venutis sees a three centuries tradition overrating the
transparent translation in the Anglo Saxon reception, that kind of translation that seems to
have been written in English and sounds like English literature. To follow Miguel ngel
Montezanti,
la traduccin, en consecuencia, anula la diferencia y complace al
pblico en el afianzamiento de la propia cultura dominante. Es lo que
se llama una estrategia de domesticacin, de modo tal que las huellas
del operador de los textos, el traductor, se esfumen totalmente y el texto
cree la nocin de limpidez, de diafanidad entre las dos lenguas. A esta
estrategia opone el tratadista [Venuti] la de extranjerizacin, con la que
el texto traducido retiene huellas del traductor, se conmueve por las
diferencias que lo separan de la cultura de la lengua de origen, discierne
sus propias limitaciones en el empeo por interpretarlas y en fin, pone
en tela de juicio los presupuestos culturales, lingsticos e ideolgicos
de la lengua receptora, con lo que naturalmente esta se enriquece y
plenifica. (en Bradford, 162)

5
Even if he has to underscore that the translated text is always a translated text (and
not a poem that sounds fine in English), it seems like Weinberger wants to avoid in all the
extent the co-option of cultural differences that are usually manipulated in order to
familiarize the translated text with the target language and its readers. In spite of the
theoretical scruples of Weinberger, there is no doubt that la expansin de los horizontes
de lo posible1, one of his own premises, this is, the introduction of something till that
moment not available in the target language (this case, English), is successfully
accomplished in his translation of Altazor (2004): therefore the debate should be focused
on whether Weinbergers version 1) it does become one of those advocacy criticism
that he mentions, a term that he understands as criticism for a cause, this time the cause
fro the need of reading Huidobro, being taken by the discoveries of his poetic, more or
less close to his creacionista creed. And 2) to pay attention to the contradiction of
Weinberger as theoretician, not as a practitioner of translation, because he has written a
conspicuous poem in English, even though he vocally advocated to keep a differentiated
reading statute whenever we read a translated text, different from the one we agree with
meanwhile reading a poem written originally in English.
Since the translation study field set sail through the Wide Sea of comparative
literature, although according to Susan Bassnett (1993) the relationship tends to be
exactly the opposite, being comparative literature just a branch of Translation Studies, we
would like to take a little bit farther the analisis of the tranlation of this huidobrian poem,
to set the question for the genealogy of this translation, and furthermore, to ask why
Huidobro didnt make it to that selective group (Juan Ramn Jimnez, Antonio Machado,
Pablo Neruda, Federico Garca Lorca, Csar Vallejo) when Robert Bly discovered
1

The translation is mine.

6
Latin American Poetry in an Oslo library. Even if we take in consideration the personal
and aesthetic gaps between Huidobro and Neruda, for instance, the question remains the
same if the obvious affinities with other poets like Vallejo are brought to the front.
This would be a fascinating research to take on, in so far we would have to put in one
and the same diachronic perspective both the poetry of those picked by Bly (an
heterogeneous group on its own), altogether with Robert Blys poetry, looking forward to
address the formal analysis of the eventual exchanges occurred in that translating process.
Neither could we disregard the public role that some omnipresent figures had, such as
Neruda and Garca Lorca (by definition epitomies of the Left), keeping in mind too how
much cost to Huidobro his private feud with the Chilean Nobel Prize and his withdrawal
from the Communist Party.
Also a factor in the fate of Huidobros poetry in English, are the translations of other
authors close to Huidobros atmosphere (this word comes handy when you are talking
about Altazor), especially nowadays when the time past by has smoothed things over.
Today the dispute between Huidobro and Reverdy for the ownership of creacionismo is
outdated, but neither their work nor Max Jacobs are, another French author both
translated into English by John Ashbery, among others. As a matter of fact, the influence
of French surrealism in this American poet has been extensively studied, but we are not
so sure when it comes to the study of up to what extents his work as a translator has
impacted his own poetry.
Therefore, we cannot make a valid assessment of Weinbergers translation if we go
line by line or deciding on a whim, randomly to separate one verse, that out of its context
can be easily be put under the microscope of any point of view that in this way shows its

7
irrelevance. Is in this sense that any attempt to translate Altazor implies, either implicit or
explicitly, an interpretation of it. This could be somewhat redundant, but there is more in
it than we can suppose without paying some close attention to this matter. Some
reserchers like Jos Quiroga assume, that Altazor can be understood as the sequence of a
long trip through the possibilities of language, its death and renaissance. Thus, Altazor
would be a poem purportedly about literature, according to Quiroga (in Balderston,
Daniel y Schwartz, Marcy E. (editors) Voice-overs, 164). From this position he reviews
the translation done by Weinberger as a sheer example of that mix that blends nostalgia
for orality and the presence of criture, a concoction that, again according to Quiroga, is
in the essence of much of the Latin American poetry. Following this line of thought, the
elegant translation that Weinberger does of the sonority of Huidobros Altazor, is nothing
else than the manifestation of that inner tension in our poetry among writing and sound,
meaning and orality. The alleged essential heterogeneity of language in Altazor, leads
Quiroga to deny Weinberger any chance of being at the same time faithful on one hand to
the sounds of the poem, and to its meaning also.
What is worrisome to me from the conclusions of Quiroga, has not much to do with
his assessment of the more or less accuracy and/or faithfulness of the translation, but the
implicit assumptions underneath his rationale.
For Quiroga, Weinbergers translation is the evidence of an aporia (169):this paradox
would be that the Latin American text is always the result of a previous translation, this is
to say, before being translated to any given language (Russian, Chinese, English or
Croatian, or any), every single Latin American text is beforehand- a translation from the
plenitude of orality, the Latin American text is nothing different than nostalgia for that

8
out-of-reach totality , undermining, at the same time, the very idea of an original.
However, this attachment to a lost and unreachable totality seems to us suspiciously
patronizing, as far as it contemplates a common source (a primal scene, 165) to a
variety of poetics that do not belong necessarily to the same root notwithstanding their
shared label as Latin Americans. This involves as well the reproduction of an image of
Latin America associated to the arcaic, primitive, natural, intact and virgin: however, for
better or worse, from its very beginnings as Latin America and not as Indigenous
America- hibridity and blend, sincretism and heterogeneity have been its trade mark. And
I do not believe neither that in the symbolic sphere could be acceptable this kind of
reckless return to the origins, because this nostalgia usually is a modernity dream, a
desire and a spin-off produced from the very same process that is trying to escape from.
For us, we understand the Huidobros poem related to the loss of existential meaning
that men and women between the wars had to confront (the text dates from 1918 initially
till its conclusion in 1931), in the middle of a spread feeling of rootlessness that could
only find redemption through an utopia both personal and collective. This approach,
explored before by Cedomil Gic (1992), allows us to read the same fragments associated
by Quiroga to a long lasting aporia in Latin American poetry (an aporia for us wrongfully
and suspiciously established), as the disintegration of that anguished subject in between
the wars, as a previous step for its future resurrection.
This way, we could imagine a crescendo in the seven cantos structure of Altazor.
From a romantic anthem written in the creacionista tune, as can be defined canto II,
including also the First canto where the communicative situation is settled, the
unavoidable fall and the recognition of the lyric speaker as subject (No quiero ligaduras

9
de astro ni de viento/Ligaduras de luna buenas son para el mar y las mujeres/Dadme mis
violines de vrtigo insumiso/Mi libertad de msica escapada2) till apparently the final
decomposition of any kind of communication in the last canto. Skepticism about the
possibilities of language, but mostly an indagatory around the always risky chances of
stablishing a subject, Altazor presupposes a defeat, since, as Guillermo Sucre points, es
significativo, al menos, que Altazor concluya en la explosin del lenguaje y no en la
creacin de uno nuevo (108). This statement, however, must be kept in mind as part of
the global vision that Sucre holds about Huidobro as author.
For him, Altazor is a watershed point between the most overtly avant-garde days of
Huidobro and its ending with the parachute fly that finishes on 1931. According to Sucre,
the altazorian anguish became meditation. Titles such as Ver y palpar (1941), El
ciudadano del olvido (1941), but principally ltimos poemas (1948), recover for
Huidobrian work that signification seemingly forgotten meanwhile Altazor was written.
Symptomatically, this seems to be (we are speaking in all good faith), the non
declared debt of Quiroga with Sucre: what this last one talks about is the return implied
in this new and final period in Huidobros poetry after Altazor. Sucre understands the
new nostalgia in which the poetry of Huidobro is drenched as the lesson learned from the
altazorian years, so as to renew again his faith not as much in the message of poetry,
but in the word itself, in its capacity of being not only the signifier, but foremost the very
sign on its own.
So critics appear divided among those who see the recognition of the impossibility of
absolute (Altazors last moment) as a failure of Huidobros entreprise, as Sucre and

In http://www.vicentehuidobro.uchile.cl/altazor_canto1.htm

1
Quiroga do, and also till some extent Andrs Morales3, and, those others like Weinberger4
for whom the vivid momentum of Altazor and futurity potential is a challenge in that
hereafter, when
poems would be written in bird-language, star-language, airplanelanguage, and we would all inhabit a beautiful madness in the zone
of language. For decades it was thought that Altazor was a noble
disaster that admitted its own failure by its descent into gibberish.
Lately the postmoderns have used it as a prophesy of their revelation
of the fundamental meaninglessness of language. This wasnt what
he meant at all: once upon a time, the new was sacred, and the future
the only mythical era. (Weinberger, 16)
I have no certainty about this, but I do not think that Weinberger knows Juan Luis
Martnezs work, at least not in detail. All the same, to say that in the future poetry will be
written in the language of the birds, especially in the Chilean environment, looks like the
perfect self-fulfilling prophecy reading some passages of La nueva novela (1977)5.
Is probable worth to bring here what Pedro Lastra said in respect a secret relation
between James Joyces Ulysses (1922) and Altazor, in regard the debate around the origin
of Altazor and its supposed nostalgia for some orality that would be some kind of hidden
ideological subtext for its composition.
Lastra tells that Borges, in a review about a translation of Ulysses by J. Salas Subirat
published in 1945, praised the options taken to translate some especially difficult pieces
of Joyces novel. Borges takes some time to detail the accomplishments of the translator:
"Que no era un rbolcielo, no un antrocielo, no un bestiacielo, no un hombrecielo, -que

Morales interprets Altazors pass as a voltaic arc, and after this his writing became more spontaneous
and filled with an emotivity easier to access for the reader.
4
Also, the very interesting doctoral dissertation of Mario vila Rubio, Altazor: la experiencia del triunfo,
in http://sisbib.unmsm.edu.pe/bibVirtual/Libros/literatura/Altaz_Exp_triunf/indice.htm
5
Not to mention Pablo Nerudas Arte de pjaros (1966), although we do not know if Neruda and his flock
would be happy to hear about it.

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recta e inventivamente traduce- That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a
heavenbeast, not a heavenman". (233)
What is deeply interesting are the dots that Lastra ties, reminding us that Huidobro
was living in Paris when Ulysses was published, by Shakespeare & co. It would not be
ludicrous, Lastra says, to assume that Huidobro know the work of Joyce, given his
intellectual curiosity and how closely he followed that avant-garde world to which he
belonged too as one of its protagonists. After noticing there is no mention at all of Joyce
in Huidobros biography, Lastra cannot help to pose this question: Indicar ese silencio
una cierta voluntad de ocultamiento de un antecedente que opacara en algo su
originalidad? (2002). More interesting though is the final observation done by Lastra,
speculating about the possibility that the same Salas Subirats (whose translation of
Ulysses, lets remind it again, dates from 1945, fourteen years later the first edition of
Altazor) could have been a privileged reader of Altazor, wrapping up a virtuous circle
that had begun in 1922 with the first Ulysses, to end (via Huidobros work) in the 1945
edition, published by Santiago Rueda in Argentina, brought into Spanish by Jos Salas
Subirats, a self-taught and insurance salesman, born in Argentina, not in Chile nor
Catalua as some legend has imagined, right after the beginning of 20th century . He died
in Florida, a town close to Buenos Aires, in 1975.
As a conclusion, we are inclined to see Weinberger's translation as a very close
version of what Jorge Luis Borges thought of translation A conspicuous visitor that
stopped in Argentina in the first part of twentieth century was Henri Michaux, to whom
Borges met in 1935, translating his Un brbaro en el Asia soon after. Borges said that
we call the attention upon this due to its importance to illustrate the links between Borges

1
and Weinberger he had translated that book as part of a game rather than a job (no
como un deber sino como un juego, Waisman 41). These words ooze the idea that
translation is like a game, experimentation and a process of discovery () and reflects
Argentine culture's polyglot character, especially in those times(Waisman 41). About the
same time when he translated Michaux, Borges was publishing the essays on which he
exposes his ideas about this topic, namely Las dos maneras de traducir, from 1926, La
versiones homricas, of 1932 and Los traductores de las 1001 noches, in1935. There
Borges advocates for that kind of translations for whom to reproduce the original in the
target language is not the goal, nor what is lost in the translation process. Conversely,
Borges applauds all those works that in one way or the other disrespect the original to
be translated, the ones that dont try to be faithful to it, but they do feel free to undergo as
many crealtive licenses as they feel/need like the same that Borges reveled in. Thus, he
will compare the different Homeric versions, emphasizing this word, equivalent one to
each other, all legitimate, and in the long run, complementary. As a matter of fact, Borges
pays special attention, among the translators of the Arabian Nights, to those like Burton
and Galland, as far as they domesticate the original6 scandalizing the more
contemporary translation theories, always with a politically correct prevalent agenda,
becoming these translators something similar to a somewhat co-author in their language
of the text they are working with. This is so since Burton, on one hand, meanwhile
addressing an audience of XIX century-white-male-gentleman from London, make
uncountable substitutions; he works with an extense vocabulary, contradictory and
uneven that holds neologisms and foreign terms; he completely re-writes the first and last
stories; and he made several changes, omisions and interpolations (Waisman 80).
6

Original that according to Waisman- has never been completely established.

1
Borges calls these textual procedures as A fine distortion, since these verbal pranks and
some other syntactical ones distract the sometimes overwhelming course of the Nights
(Waisman 80), this is, an overt eulogy of unfaithfulness as translation strategy.
The erosion of the concept of original associated to these ideas, is fundamental so as
to destabilize the preeminence of a text that must be respected and enshrined and, at the
same time, to keep some artificial hierarchies (North-South, canonical v/s no canonical)
that only echo the interests of private agendas. There are obvious differences among
Weinberger's and Borges' views of translation as a cultural process. There are obvious
coincidences too. None of the two wrote in the same atmosphere either. Even though for
the Huidobro's translator the problem of the reception of a translated text in the target
culture is essential (as far as the target culture is a non Third World Culture), from
Borges' stance things look pretty different. There was no inconvenient in Borges' view of
any domestication since he himself was trying to domesticate or familiarize those texts
from abroad that he was so fond to (in the assumption that the word foreign had the
same meaning in the Borges' universe than to the rest of us). But either the Argentine
writer or Weinberger, both of them make very clear the case for a translation that should
be riddle of any pre-imposed hierarchies and that should work as a work on its own,
disregarding any ties to the first language trying to keep a tight hold over the form and
the meaning. The sentence that recommends to keep reading the classics because we
never read them for the first time, but always through the collection of refractions and
interpretation done of them through out History, has never been more necessary, truthful,
and accurate. Whether these interpretations and readings are correct or no, faithful or

1
unfaithful, is still a matter for debate The notion of a "definitive text" (lets quote Borges
to end this article) belongs to religion or perhaps merely to exhaustion.

WORKS CITED

Balderston, Daniel y Schwartz, Marcy E. (editors). Voice-overs. N.Y: State University of

New York Press, 2002.
Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature. A Critical Introduction. Oxford & Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1993.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Textos Recobrados. 1931-1955. Buenos Aires: Emec Editores, 2002.
------------------------ Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emec Editores, 1989.
Bradford, Lisa. Traduccin como cultura. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997.
Goic, Cedomil. Los mitos degradados: Ensayos de comprensin de la Literatura
Hispanoamericana. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992.

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Huidobro, Vicente. Translated by Eliot Weinberger. Middletown, Connecticut: Altazor.
Wesleyan, 2004.
------------------------. Altazor. Santiago: Universitaria, 2004.
------------------------. Andrs Morales (editor). Altazor de puo y letra. Santiago: Banco
del Estado, 1999.
-----------------------. Ver y palpar. Santiago: Ediciones Ercilla, 1941.
-----------------------. El ciudadano del olvido. Santiago: Ediciones Ercilla, 1941.
-----------------------. ltimos poemas. Santiago: Talleres Grficos Ahus Hnos., 1948.
Lastra, Pedro. De Joyce a Huidobro?, in Hiper feria,
http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Publish/hiper/num3/artic/plastra.htm, 2002
Martnez, Juan Luis. La nueva novela. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Archivo, 1977.
Morales, Andrs. A sesenta aos de la muerte de Vicente Huidobro. In La pgina de
Andrs Morales. http://paginadeandresmorales.blogspot.com/2008/08/sesenta-aos-de-lamuerte-de-vicente.html#links, 2008
Rodrguez Monegal, Emir. Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature. N.Y: Alfred
Knopf, 1977.
Waisman, Sergio. Borges y la traduccin. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2005.
Weinberger, Eliot. Outside stories. N.Y. New Directions, 1992.

Read, Justin. The 'New Original' English Translation of Vicente Huidobro's 'Altazor.'" Translation Review, No.
71 (2006): 61-65.