Altazor


                             (fragments)



Altazor, why have you lost your prime serenity?
What wicked angel stopped at the door of your smile
Sword in hand?
Who scattered anguish in the plains of your eyes
like the adorning of a god?
Why one day did you suddenly feel the terror of living?
And in that voice that cried to you you live without
Seeing yourself living
Who converged your thoughts at the cross
Of all the winds of pain?

The diamond of your dreams ruptured in a lazy sea
You are lost, Altazor
Alone in the middle of the universe
Alone like a note that flourishes in the heights of the void
There are neither good nor evil nor truth nor order nor beauty

Where are you, Altazor?

The nebula of anguish passes like a river
And it drags me according to the law of attraction
The nebula in odors solidified flees its solitude
I sense a telescope pointing at me like a pistol
The tail of a comet whips my face flush with eternity
Searching untiring a quiet lake to refresh itself
In its unavoidable work
Altazor, you will die Your voice will dry up
and you will be invisible
The earth will follow gyrating in its precise orbit
Awe-inspiring stumbling like a tightrope walker
On a wire attracting gazes of dread

In vain you search for a maddened eye
There is no exit door and the wind displaces the planets
You think it doesn’t matter to fall eternally
if you can achieve escape?

Can’t you see you are already falling?
Erase from your mind morals and prejudice
And if wanting to arise you have attained nothing
Let yourself fall without halting your fall
Without fear at the depth of the shadow
Fearless at the enigma of yourself
Perhaps you may encounter a light without night
Lost in the fissures of cliffs

Fall
      Fall eternally
Fall to the depth of infinity
Fall to the depth of time
Fall to the depth of yourself
Fall as low as you can
Fall without vertigo
By means of all the spaces and all the ages
By means of all the souls and all the yearnings
Of all the shipwrecks
Fall and burn in passing stars and seas
Burn the eyes that watch you and the hearts that await you

Burn the wind with your voice
The wind entangled in your voice
And the cold night in in its cavern of bones

Fall in childhood
Fall in old age
Fall in tears
Fall in laughter
Fall in music of the universe
Fall from head to feet
Fall from feet to head
Fall from the sea to the fountain
Fall to the ultimate abyss of silence
Like the boat that sinks extinguishing its lights

All is finished


                              ***


I am Altazor
Altazor
Enclosed in the cage of destiny
In vain I grapple with bars of possible evasion
A flower seals the road
And raises itself like a statue of flames
Evasion impossible
I walk with my worries weaker
Than an army without light in the middle of an ambush

I opened my eyes in the century
In which Christianity would die
Twisted in its agonized cross
Already it will breathe its last breath
And what will we put in its empty space tomorrow?
We will place a dawn or a dusk
And is there something else?

The crown of thorns
Dripping its ultimate stars withers away
Christianity which hasn’t solved any problems will die

Having only taught dead prayers
Will die after two-thousand years of existence
An enormous bombardment has put a period on the Christian era
The Christ wants to die accompanied by millions of souls
Bury it with its temples
And walk over death with an immense retinue
A thousand airplanes salute the new era
They are the oracles and the flags

It’s been six months only since
I left the equatorial recently cut
In the warlike tomb of a patient slave
Crown of piety over human stupidity
It is I who is speaking in this year 1919
It is winter
Europe has buried all its dead
And a thousand tears form a single cross of snow
Look at those steppes that shake hands
Millions of workingmen have understood at last
And they raise to the skies their morning flags
Come come we await you because you are hope
The only hope
The last hope.


                                             (from Canto I)

Vicente Huidobro