Handbook of Foams: Manual de espumas

Manual de espumas was published in 1924 and was one of the most important eruptions in the early phase of the 20th-century Spanish avant-garde. Heavily influenced by Vicente Huidobro and his theories of Creationism, the book is effectively the first Creationist volume by someone other than Huidobro himself, while also being the volume that carried the banner for Ultraism, Spain's first movement of the vanguardia.

About the Author :
Gerardo Diego (1896-1987) is arguably the least known Spanish poet of the renowned "generation of '27," which included Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén and Luis Cernuda to name a few. With the exception of Lorca, who was executed at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, these others went into exile, which may explain, in part, why Diego is less known. And yet Diego was among the most active in his cohort, having the foresight to edit the ground-breaking and prophetic Spanish Poetry Anthology 1915-1931, in which he gathers this generation of poets for the first time, as well as some of their immediate mentors. He was also among the most fervent of this cohort to explore and embrace the avant-garde tendencies of his time, particularly creacionismo, which he alternates throughout his writing career with more traditional verse forms, making him unique. He also edited two journals: Carmen: a little magazine of Spanish poetry, and Lola: Carmen's friend and supplement. Over the course of his career, his many books won all the major poetry prizes in Spain and he shared the Cervantes Prize with Jorge Luis Borges in 1979. An accomplished pianist and music critic, his day job throughout his professional life was as a high-school French teacher. The last project to occupy Diego was the preparation of his two-volume Poetry. He completed the task, but his death on the afternoon of July 8, 1987, a month short of his 91st birthday, prevented him from holding the handsome hefty volumes, which finally appeared in 1989. In 1996, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, various acts and exhibitions were organized, among them one at the National Library in Madrid titled Gerardo Diego and Spanish Poetry in the 20th Century.

Review :
"Francisco Aragón's translation of Gerardo Diego's musical and sea-misted Handbook of Foams makes a valuable contribution to the study of Spain's Generation of '27 by expanding our understanding of its aesthetics and alliances beyond its most celebrated member, Federico García Lorca. With his introduction, Aragón usefully maps Diego's early poetic engagements to demonstrate the impact of Latin American poets, namely that of the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, on Handbook of Foams and, more generally, Spanish and European avant-garde poetry." —Rosa Alcalá "Lemons and planets, crickets and trains, kites and stars, consumptives and suicides; seaside panorama that "never waxes or wanes," but where the "wind awaits the hospital's opening hour." Both the structure of avant-garde feeling and the technique of composition that Gerardo Diego brought to his Handbook of Foams transfigure the plastic worldliness of bodies, things, and surroundings into a recital of the otherworldly, into stage lighting and sound effects that encompass at once "a corner of the countryside" and the crime scenes of modern life. Translator-poet Francisco Aragón has finely rendered into English the image principle unique to creacionista causation and Diego's particular recital of its ebb and flow." —Roberto Tejada