A Report on Josué Rodriguez’s Colloquium Presentation
by Rudrani Gangopadhyay
On November 30th, Josué Rodriguez presented the second colloquium of the 2017-2018 school year on Vicente Huidobro’s Creacionista Poetics and the Translation of Surrealist Automatic Poetry. He began by providing a brief introduction of his dissertation project, tentatively titled “In Search of the Magic Equivalent: Colonial Critiques and Stylistic Appropriations of Surrealism in the Latin American Vanguards,” and then moved on to present his first chapter. Josué’s presentation on Creacionista poetics delved more into questions of influence, originality, and translation, rather than literary history.
Creacionismo was a short-lived experimental literary movement among Spanish writers in France, Spain, and Latin America, founded by Vicente Huidobro (1893 – 1948) in Paris around 1916. Huidobro was a Chilean poet who was simultaneously a Romantic, a surrealist, a cubist, a futurist, and was described as “a translator of European aesthetics and avant-garde influences”. For followers of Creationism, the poet’s role was to create a personal imagined world rather than describing the world of nature. This was achieved by bold juxtaposition of images and metaphors, and an use of original vocabulary consisting of idiosyncratically combined words. Josué argues that this movement, engaged inherently with notions of originality and genealogy of poetry, is one that translates other movements and therefore renders poetry as truly transnational and translinguistic.
Surrealism is an important influence on the Creationist movement, and in fact, Huidobro claims ownership of the surrealist style of automatic writing. Josué envisions Creacionismo as a part of a long-term teleological arc engaged with other avant-garde movements, and as a natural continuation of the larger movement of poetry. Like Walter Benjamin, Huidobro believed the task of the translator is to carry a text beyond borders and languages, and aimed to achieve precisely that in his own work. Josué shared fascinating images of the first issue of the Creacion magazine (1921), and Huidobro’s statement in the same. The issue contained various kinds of texts (poetry, prose, musical scores) in different languages, and was truly a global text that aligned well with the universal scope of Creacionismo as imagined by Huidobro.
Josué concluded his presentation with a very interesting close reading of one of Huidobro’s short stories, ‘El Hermoso Juego’ or ‘The Beautiful Game’. The story, which is a sly criticism of surrealism, never explicitly mentions the movement, but its presence is easy to detect. In an audacious move, Huidobro engages with surrealism in a way that simultaneously critiques and celebrates it. The use of automatic poetry within the story is one of its noteworthy aspects. The use of automaticity as a strategy for textual production here allows a sense universal accessibility to the process of creation to prevail. The story also uses tropes of order and plays in deeply interesting ways that correlate to theorizations about creation as well as translation. Josué’s work focused on Creacionismo’s inherent need for translation rather than notions of originality and periodization. Huidibro’s work, he argued, is fundamentally not one movement but rather a synthesis of multiple avant-garde movements.
The presentation was followed by an enlightening round of questions and answers, pertaining particularly to anti-mimesis, and how it may relate to the process of translation. Josué also answered questions about theories of originality as well as about whether Creacionismo is somehow limiting. He stated that he would place poetry and translation in equal measure at the heart of poetry. Surrealism is a testimony to the fact that there is no such originality.
Congratulations to Josué on his excellent presentation! We are very thankful to him for sharing with us a slice of his fascinating work, and we look forward to hearing more about it.
