Virtually unknown in the United States, Huidobro was one of the most important innovators in Latin America poetry of the early twentieth century and an important theoretician of the new art. He lived in Europe for many years, specifically in Paris from 1916 to 1926, where he wrote poetry in French and participated in French poetic movements. He proclaimed himself the inventor of the school that he called Creationism, which he considered the foundation of a new way of conceiving art. For Huidobro the mission of the poet was the creation of new poetic realities. Art was totally free and the poem was free of both its poet-creator and the circumstances in which it was created. Huidobro tended… to exaggerate and became a center of polemics, but he was one of the first to announce such important avant-garde concepts. His creative work is startling because of the novelty of the metaphors and the formal and verbal experimentation.
Eliot Weinberger was born on February 6, 1949. He is a writer, editor and translator. His work has been published in 30 languages. He first gained recognition from his translations of Nobel Prize winner and poet Octavio Paz. These translations include Collected Poems 1957-1987 and In Light of India. He has also translated other writers such as Vicente Huidobro's Altazor. He received the National Board Critic's Circle Award for his edition of Borge's Selected Non-Fictions. Today Eliot Weinberger is mostly known for his essays and political articles focusing on U.S. politics and foreign policy. His literary writings include An Elemental Thing, which was selected by The Village Voice as one of… the "20 Best Books of the Year for 2009. He is also the co-author of a study of Chinese poetry translations, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. In 2000 he was the only American literary writer to be awarded the order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.