Poetry
Maelström
Not translated into English
Luis Cardoza y Aragón · 1926
Synopsis
Keemby, a poet who lived all his life without general principles, dies in the very first paragraph, killed by the shadow of a film character leaping out of the screen. Five chapters with no chronological link nevertheless take up his life: his adventures in Pompierlandia, the land of academic painters, his love for a landscape, his meditations on God, art and poetry, his decision not to kill himself, among the cinemas, cafés, trams and billiard halls of the big city.
Context
The book appeared in Paris in 1926, from Excélsior, with a prologue by Ramón Gómez de la Serna and an epigraph by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam; it is dedicated to Enrique Gómez Carrillo, another Guatemalan in Paris. Its full title announces colliding films: the author edits fragments together as in cinema, mixing verse and prose around a character named Keemby. It was his second book, after a first collection of 1924.
Who it is for
In Spanish. The text proceeds by linked images and shifts of perspective, with no continuous narrative: one has to accept losing one's footing, as before a montage.
Prizes and reception
Four editions appeared, and the journal of Vallejo and Larrea, Favorable París Poema, took notice of it. The book is considered one of the most radical of the Spanish American avant-garde.