Vicente Huidobro

Adam Vicente Huidobro

NOTE: ONLY THE PAPERBACK INCLUDES THE SPANISH ORIGINAL AS WELL Adam is a never-before-translated retelling of the Biblical creation myth by the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. However, in Huidobro's own words, "[this story's] Adam isn't the Biblical Adam, that monkey of dirt, life breathed into his nostrils; he is the scientific Adam. He is the first being to understand Nature, the first in which intelligence awoke and amazement bloomed." This book-length poem retells the age-old story through the lens of early-20th-century thought, invoking both scientific advancements and an embryonic strain of Huidobro's own creacionismo, or creationism. Vicente Huidobro was a Chilean poet born in 1893 to a wealthy family in Santiago. His mother, herself a writer, instilled an abiding love of literature in him at a young age and at just 18 he published his first work. He had a distaste for the constraints and expectations of the poetic past and instead espoused his own creacionismo movement, which held that poems should exist for themselves, not the outside world. He traveled Europe widely, spending significant amounts of time in Paris mingling with the city's artistic elite and avant-garde. He is often credited with bringing the innovations and developments of contemporary European poetry to Chile and the rest of Latin America. Over the course of his career, Huidobro published many well-regarded works, including his 1916 long poem Adam, his 1929 novel Portrait of a Paladin, and his 1931 magnum opus Altazor.