1. For critical studies of Altazor that address the vanguards and/or their linguistic issues, see the insightful work of René de Costa, especially the chapter on Altazor in Vicente Huidobro: The Careers of a Poet and, for much of the same analysis in Spanish, his introduction to the Cátedra critical edition of Altazor and Temblor del cielo . Also pertinent are Enrique Caracciolo Trejo, La poesía de Vicente Huidobro y la vanguardia; Jaime Concha, " Altazor de Vicente Huidobro"; Merlin Forster, "Vicente Huidobro's Altazor: A Re-evaluation"; Nancy B. Mandlove, "At the Outer Limits of Language: Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés and Huidobro's Altazor "; and George Yúdice, Vicente Huidobro y la motivación del lenguaje .

2. See, for example, Inez Hedges's Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film and Marjorie Perloff's The Futurist Moment: AvantGarde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture . Perloff specifically addresses this process in her chapter "The Word Set Free: Text and Image in the Russian Futurist Book" (116-60).

3. The term "aura" is Walter Bcnjamin's from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

4. Although I usually rely on Eliot Weinberger's English translation of Altazor, to sustain key images from the Spanish here I translated this segment more literally.

5. Although Weinberger's masterful English translation of Altazor includes these verses from the final Canto, I have cited only the Spanish here because the translation process not only inevitably teases out semantic associations that in the original remain latent but also, in this case, adds semantic possibilities not present in the Spanish, for example, in rendering "Ululayu / ulayu / ayu yu" as "Ululayou / lullayou / ahyou you" (EW 165).

6. The third sentence of Cien años de soledad describes the earliest days in mythical Macondo: "The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point" (71; trans. Rabassa 1).

7. Perloff cites this opening declaration from Malevich's manifesto From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: "I have transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of academic art " (Perloft 118; emphasis in original).

8. To my knowledge, there is no poetic translation of these verses into English; a literal translation would eliminate the onomatopoetic play and playful semantic suggestiveness of verses whose impact is primarily auditory.

9. David Smith provides a somewhat different translation of these verses, a variation that underscores the hermetic quality, of Vallejo's work: "999 CALORIES. / Rumbbb...... Trraprrrr track...... chaz / Serpentinic 'u' engiraffed / to the drums of the biscuitmaker" (97).

10. In a footnote to his comments on poetic language, Bakhtin explains the following: "It goes without saying that we continually advance as typical the extreme to which poetic genres aspire; in concrete examples of poetic works it is possible to find features fundamental to prose, and numerous hybrids of various generic types exist. These are especially widespread in periods of shift in literary poetic languages" ("Discourse in the Novel" 287).

11. I am indebted for this observation to Anthony Pagden in The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (15-16). It has also been applied to a Latin American context by Regina Harrison in Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (35).

12. For a fresh and insightful analysis of Sarmiento's ambivalent relationship with oral culture and of the points of contact and divergence between Sarmiento and Bello, see Julio Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: Literatura y política en el siglo XIX, in particular, chapter one, "Saber del otro: Escritura y oralidad en Facundo de D. F. Sarmiento" (19-34), and chapter two, " Saber decir: Lengua y política en Andrés Bello" (35-49).

13. On Mário de Andrade's work in the Brazilian language, see Leonor Scliar Cabral, As idéias linguísticas de Mário de Andrade; João Roberto Gomes de Faria, "Mário de Andrade e a questão da língua brasileira"; and José M. Barbosa Gomes, Mário de Andrade e a revolução da linguagem: A gramatiquinha da fala brasileira . On Brazilian modernism and Brazilian Portuguese, see Luiz Carlos Lessa, O modernismo brasileiro e a língua portuguesa .

14. For González Prada's ideas on language and literature, see "Discurso en el Teatro Olimpo," "Conferencia en el Ateneo de Lima," and "Notas acerca del idioma," in Páginas libres / Horas de Lucha .

15. Issue number 16, July 1928, of Amauta was dedicated to González Prada and included essays on his poetic work and ideas written by Eugenio Garro, Antenor Orrego, and Mariátegui himself.

16. For a more detailed discussion of Mariátegui's response to Riva Agüero and of his views on language, see my study, "Mariáegui's Aesthetic Thought: A Critical Reading of the Avant-Gardes."

17. See, for example, Eugenio Garro's "Los 'Amautas' en la historia peruana: Capítulo de una interpretación filológica de la cultura inkaika" and Abelardo Solis's "La cuestión del Quechua."

18. In Latin America, orthographic debates over the approximation of written language to speech date back to Sarmiento and Bello. In Peru, these receive their initial impulse from the vanguardists' cultural mentor, González Prada. For a look at González Prada's attention to orthographic reform and its connections with the ideas of Sarmiento and Bello, see Julio Díaz Falconi, "La reforma ortográfica de González Prada."

19. See, in particular, chapter I, "La condición del escritor," in Masiello's Lenguaje e ideología: Las escuelas argentinas de vanguardia (27-49).

20. For a detailed and discerning accounting of the varied elements making up Arlt's peculiar idiom, see Rita Gnutzmann's work, including her introduction to the Cátedra edition of Arlt's El juguete rabioso and her Roberto Arlt o el arte del calidoscopio .

21. See the Aguafuertes porteñas section in volume 2 of the Obra completa for the following sketches on language: "El furbo" (399-401), "El origen de algunas palabras de nucstro léxico popular" (401-3), "Divcrtido origen de la palabra 'squenun'" (403-5), and "El idioma de los argentinos" (485-87). For a brief discussion of Arlt's attention to popular language in the aguafuertes, see Daniel L. Scroggins, Las aguafuertes porteñas de Roberto Arlt (68-71). Scroggins also provides in a footnote on page 69 a more complete listing of Arlt's aguafuertes on popular speech, not all of which have been anthologized.

22. For specific examples of the language play in the Chinfonía burguesa, see my analysis of this piece in chapter 1, on performance manifestos.

23. For a comprehensive review of Martí's importance for Cuba's vanguardists of the 1920s, see Carlos Ripoll's work, including "La Revista de Avance (1927-1930): Vocero de vanguardismo y pórtico de revolución" and La generación del 23 en Cuba y otros apuntes sobre el vanguardismo, especially chapter 3, "La nueva literatura" (69-108). For a listing of pieces on Martí appearing in the Revista de Avance, see the supplementary subject matter index in Ripoll's Indice de la Revista de Avanee: Cuba 1927-1930 .

24. See Pérez Firmat's "The Devil's Dictionary" in Literature and Liminality: Festive Readings in the Hispanic Tradition (93-108) and pages 18-19 of The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature .

25. Speaking of himself in the third person, Guillén identified this poem's linguistic agenda in a 1932 lecture before a Havana literary group: "In 'Llegada,' Guillén appears to salute the arrival of his race to culture and its contribution of young blood to the ancient veins of the world" ( Prosa de prisa 1: 46).

26. Palés Matos expressed these ideas in an interview with Angela Negrón Muñoz that originally appeared in El Mundo, November 13, 1932, p. 1, under the title "Entrevista con Palés Matos."

27. Antônio Alcântara Machado's review of Macunaíma in the Revista de Antropofagia epitomizes this view. Macunaíma's refrain, the reviewer observed, was "worth more as Brazilianism" than countless literary works filled with neighborhood streets, black beans, and dark women ("Vaca" 1).

28. Although I have used the Robert Márquez and David Arthur McMurray translation for this poem's earlier verses, I have provided my own more literal translation of the final line because it sustains the linguistic metaphor essential for the point I am making.

29. For concrete examples of the interplay of voices in "As enfibraturas do Ipiranga" and the Chinfonía burguesa, see chapter 1, on performance manifestos.

30. See Keith Ellis's Cuba's Nicolás Guillén: Poetry and Ideology (71-81) for a more detailed description of the musical models for Guillén's carly work.

31. I have translated these verses literally, but in rendering "me hiere" as "wounds me," I have lost an additional nuance present in the Spanish. Herir can mean to wound or offend (figuratively, as with sensibilities, as well as literally), but it can also mean to play (or pluck) a stringed instrument. This metaphoric identification of the poetic speaker with his instrument, the means of his art (the symphony "wounds" or "plays" him), is lost in the translation.

32. To maintain the original text's image of "a fala impura" (impure speech), I have rendered my own translation here.

33. In his introduction to Las vanguardias literarias en Hispanoamérica, for example, Hugo Verani writes that "while Huidobro aspires to be the leader of a movement, to liberate art from all sentimentalism and all impurity, ... Neruda desires neither to create a school nor to be the spokesman for any movement; he rarely formulates the principles of his own aesthetics, and when he does so, he defends 'impure poetry' " (32-33).

34. In addition to René de Costa's chapter on the Residencia cycle ( Pablo Neruda 58-104), in which he discusses the relationship between the manifesto on impurity and a change in Neruda's poetic language and style, see Manuel Durán, "Sobre la poesía de Neruda, la tradición simbolista y la desintegración del yo" (on the tcnsions between the Residencia poems and the concept of pure poetry); Luis F. González-Cruz, Neruda: De Tentativa a la totalidad (on language in Tentativa del hombre infinito ); Merlin H. Forster, "Pablo Ncruda and the Avant-Garde," on his relationship to the vanguards; and Saúl Yurkievich, "La imaginación mitológica dc Pablo Neruda" in Fundadores de la nueva poesía Iatinoamericana (171-230).

35. Verani, for example, cites the syntactical disruptions and disconnected imagery of the Residencia as symptomatic of the "Nerudian vision of a disarticulated reality in which everything disintegrates" (34).

36. One of Neruda's principal translators, Ben Belitt, renders "De conversaciones gastadas como usadas maderas" as "From table-talk flimsy as scrapwood" ( Five Decades 7 ). I have used my own more literal (and less poetic) translation to make clear the connection with the manifesto's image of "wearing away."

37. David Smith's translation of these verses, whose differences with the Seiferle version once again underscore Trilce 's inaccessibility, is "A bit more consideration, / and the runny humus, six in the afternoon / WITH THE MOST POMPOUS FLATS " (19).

38. Although the readings by von Buelow and Franco arc the most pertinent to my own points here about the vanguards' images of language, Julio Ortega's meticulously annotated critical edition of Trilce provides an invaluable guide through the daunting Vallejo bibliography. See, in particular, his detailed summaries of critical studies (including his own) on each poem in the collection. On poem xxxvi, see pages 178-83. On Trilce, see also Yurkievich's chapter, "En torno de Trilce, " in Fundadores de la nueva poesía latinoamericana (17-30) and Ortega's own La teoría poética de César Vallejo .

39. In the polemical piece "Contra el secreto profesional" (1927), Vallejo attacked his gcneration for its "false and epidermic Latin Americanism" that resulted from aping Europe and argued instead that vernacular art resulted from being autochthonous without saying it ( MPP 241-44).

40. Asturias included Cuculcán and the prose piece "Los brujos de la tormenta primaveral" in the 1948 edition of the Leyendas de Guatemala, a work written in the 1920s and first published in 1930. The 1930 edition of the Leyendas, published by Madrid's Editorial Oriente, included "Guatemala," "Ahora que me acuerdo," "Leyenda del Volcán," "Leyenda del Cadejo,'' "Leyenda de la Tatuana," "Leyenda del Sombrerón," and "Leyenda del tesoro del lugar florido." The 1948 expanded Spanish edition that included Cuculcán was published in Buenos Aires by Pleamar. Four more leyendas were published in the 1967 prose piece collection El espejo de Lida Sal (Mexico: Siglo XXI), and some recent editions of the expanded Leyendas have also incorporated these: "Leyendas de las tablillas que cantan," "Leyenda de la máscara de cristal," "Leyenda de la campana difunta," and "Leyenda de Matachines." Since I am interested in Cuculcán as a product of the vanguard period, my own references to the Leyendas as an integral work do not take into account these last four pieces.

41. Between 1924 and 1932, Asturias served as a Parisian correspondent for Guatemala's El Impartial and wrote 440 articles, including the theater piece. These have recently become accessible through Amos Segala's critical edition, Paris 1924-1933: Periodismo y creación literaria .

42. In the notes to Cuculcán, Asturias observes that there is a strong connection here between the Kukulkán of the Mayas, the Gucumatz of the Quichés, and the Quctzalcouatl of the Nahuas (115). The Guacamayo, "Gran Saliva del Espcjo," is a recurring figure in Asturias's work. In the Leyendas de Guatemala, he appears in "Leyenda del tesoro del lugar florido" and "Los brujos de la tormenta primaveral."

43. Eladia León Hill, in her study of "the ancestral" in Asturias's work, suggests that Yaí ultimately embraces both points of view: the Guacamayo's affirmation of life's transitory quality and Cuculcán's embodiment of the eternal creation and re-creation of the world (68-69). Although the dramatic world of Cuculcán does indeed incorporate the two views, if one focuses on the play's linguistic themes and qualities, the Guacamayo's views seem to prevail. For recent attention to Asturias's use of Mayan sources, particularly in Hombres de maíz, see René Prieto's outstanding work, such as "The New American Idiom of Miguel Angel Asturias."

44. Nouhaud suggests this in "QueUe belle chose qu'un soleil d'aurore" (252). A more extensive analysis of Cuculcán appears in her introduction to the critical edition of Tres de cuatro soles, in which she relates the questions of orality, writing, and textuality in Cuculcán to the treatment of these issues in the other work.

45. As Asturias explains in the notes to Cuculcán, in the Popol Vuh, the Guacamayo's pride is his downfall, as he declares immodestly, "I the sun, I the light, I the moon" (115).

46. Asturias observes in the notes to Cuculcán that these references, to the "yellow flint," the "red flint," the ''black flint," etc., re-create the descriptions in the books of Chilam Balam of Mayan conceptions of the world's four cardinal points (115).

47. I have not translated the last two passages cited because a literal rendering would eliminate the alliterative word plays that constitute the substance of these scenes and illustrate my point.