Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben), page 1
RUBÉN DARÍO : SELECTED WRITINGS
RUBÉN DARÍO (Félix García Sarmiento) was born in Metapa (renamed Ciudad Darío), a small town in Nicaragua, on January 18th, 1867. His parents soon separated. His mother took him to Honduras, but eventually returned to Nicaragua and Darío was raised in León. He was writing epitaphs in verse on commission by age eleven, and his first verses were published when he was thirteen years old in the newspaper El Termómetro. In 1884, Darío worked as a presidential staff member under the regime of Adán Cárdenas, as well as in the National Library. He made his first trip to Chile in 1886, and debuted as a poet in book form with Abrojos in 1887, but it was the combination of poetry and prose in Azul . . . (1888) that made him famous and transformed him into the lightning rod of the Modernista movement in the Spanish-speaking Americas. Soon after, Darío began contributing to the Argentine daily La Nación, a professional relationship that would last until his death. In Nicaragua, he married Rafaela Contreras Cañas, the first of three wives with whom he would have four children, two of whom died in infancy. A coup d’etat in Nicaragua in 1890 forced him to move to Guatemala and El Salvador. Darío was named secretary of the Nicaraguan delegation in charge of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1892 and also made his first, revelatory trip to Spain. Rafaela Contreras Cañas died soon after. Months later, Darío married Rosario Murillo. In 1893 Darío met Paul Verlaine in Paris, and, in New York, José Martí, with whom he forged a friendship. In 1896 his books Los Raros [The Misfits] and Prosas profanas y otros poemas [Profane Prose and Other Poems] were published. He also started to serialize a novel called El hombre de oro [Man of Gold], which was influenced by Flaubert’s Salambó. In 1898 the Spanish-American War took place and shook Darío to the core. He denounced the United States in a series of poems and articles written for various periodicals. A year later, he traveled to Barcelona, then to Madrid. His experiences in Spain would be described in the chronicles and literary portraits of España contemporánea [Contemporary Spain] (1901). In 1899 he met Ramón María Valle-Inclán, Juan Ramón Jiménez, as well as Francisca Sánchez, an illiterate peasant from Navalsáuz, whom Darío taught to read. The couple relocated in Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for La Nación, focusing on the Exposition Universelle de Paris. In 1903 he became consul of Nicaragua in Paris, where he had already met Antonio and Manuel Machado. From there he visited Barcelona and a year later traveled to Gibraltar, Morocco, and various locations in Spain. His book Cantos de vida y esperanza: Los cisnes y otros poemas [Songs of Life and Hope/Swans and Other Poems] appeared in 1905, followed a couple of years later by El canto errante [Wandering Song]. Darío was named to a diplomatic post in Spain by the Nicaraguan government in 1907 while he was in the country trying unsuccessfully to annul his marriage to Rosario Murillo. In 1909 he published Alfonso XIII and El viaje a Nicaragua e Intermezzo tropical [Voyage to Nicaragua and Tropical Intermezzo]. Poema del otoño y otros poemas [Autumn Poems and Other Poems] appeared in 1910, which is also when he visited Mexico to participate in the centenary commemoration of El Grito de Dolores [The Cry of Dolores] just as that country was about to be swept by a peasant revolution. While he was in Mexico City, Nicaraguan President José Madriz was deposed, and Darío abruptly left for Cuba. In 1911-12, he was contracted to edit and promote Mundial Magazine. His memoir Historia de mis libros [The Story of My Books] was serialized in La Nación in 1913. His health deteriorated and his cirrhosis of the liver became public knowledge. His last volume of poetry, Canto a la Argentina y otros poemas [Song to Argentina and Other Poems], was released in 1914, along with the first of three volumes of selected poems chosen by the poet and published in Madrid by Biblioteca Corona: Muy siglo XVIII [And Those that Come from the Eighteenth Century] (1914); Muy antiguo y muy moderno [Some Both Ancient and Modern] (1915); and Y una sed de ilusiones infinita [And a Thirst for Illusive Hope That’s Endless] (1916). His autobiography, La vida de Rubén Darío escrita por él mismo [The Life of Rubén Darío, Written by Himself], appeared in 1915. He became gravely ill during a lecture tour of the United States, and returned to León, Nicaragua, early in 1916. Rubén Darío died on February 6, 1916. He was buried near the statue of Saint Paul, in the Cathedral of León.
A translator of some three dozen book-length works of literature, criticism, history, and memoir, ANDREW HURLEY is best known for his translation of Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions (1998), as well as Reinaldo Arenas’s “Pentagony” novels (1986-2000). He lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
GREG SIMON has published translations of poetry from the work of Spanish, Portuguese, German and Russian writers, and is the co-translator, with Steven F. White and Christopher Maurer, of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (1988).
STEVEN F. WHITE has edited and translated anthologies of contemporary poetry from Nicaragua, Chile, and Brazil. He is the author of Modern Nicaraguan Poetry: Dialogues with France and the United States (1993) and El mundo más que humano en la poesía de Pablo Antonio Cuadra: Un estudio ecocrítico (2002). He is a corresponding member of the Nicaraguan Academy of the Language and teaches Spanish at St. Lawrence University.
ILAN STAVANS is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and the Five-College 40th Anniversary Distinguished Professor at Amherst College. His books include The Hispanic Condition (1995), The Riddle of Cantinflas (1998), On Borrowed Words (2001), Spanglish (2003), and Dictionary Days (2005). He edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays (1997), The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003), and the four-volume Encyclopedia Latina (2005).
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Copyright © Ilan Stavans, 2005
Copyright © Greg Simon and Steven F. White, 2005
Copyright © Andrew Hurley, 2005
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Darío, Rubén, 1867-1916.
[Selections. English & Spanish. 2005]
Selected writings / Ruben Dario ; edited with an introduction by Ilan Stavans ; translated by
Andrew Hurley, Greg Simon and Steven F. White.
p. cm.—(Penguin Classics)
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-143-03936-5
I. Stavans, Ilan. II. Hurley, Andrew. III. Simon, Greg. IV. White, Steven F., 1955-
V. Title. VI. Series.
PQ7519.D3A228 2005
861’.5—dc22 2005045224
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
POEMS
TRANSLATORS’ NOTE
I. - And Those That Come from the Eighteenth Century
II. - Some Both Ancient and Modern
III. - Some Audacious, Cosmopolitan
IV. - And a Thirst for Illusive Hope That’s Endless
STORIES AND FABLES
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
On Poetry and the Poet
THE BOURGEOIS KING
THE DEAF SATYR
MY AUNT ROSA
TALE OF THE SEA
THE BALE
Fantasy, Horror, and the Grotesque
THE LARVA
THANATOPHOBIA
HUITZILOPOXTLI - A Mexican legend
THE CASE OF MADEMOISELLE AMÉLIE - A story for New Year’s
Myth and Legend
PALIMPSEST I
PALIMPSEST II
THE RUBY
THE BIRTH OF CABBAGE
QUEEN MAB’S VEIL
Fables
THE PALACE OF THE SUN
THE DEATH OF THE EMPRESS OF CHINA
JUAN BUENO’S LOSSES
FEBEA
FUGITIVE
GYRFALCONS OF ISRAEL
THE STRANGE DEATH OF FRAY PEDRO
THE NYMPH - A Parisian story
THE BLACK SOLOMON
THUS SPAKE AHASUERUS
THE STORY OF MARTIN GUERRE
Prose Poems
IN THE ENCHANTED LAND
THE HON EYMOON SONG
BLOODY
SIREN-CATCHERS
OCEAN IDYLL
THE SONG OF WINTER
THE IDEAL
BÖKLIN : “THE ISLE OF THE DEAD”
SIRENS AND TRITONS
THE CLEPSYDRA: THE EXTRACTION OF THE IDEA
WAR
ESSAYS, OPINIONS, TRAVEL WRITING, AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
MODERNISMO
THE STORY OF MY BOOKS
AZURE
FRONTISPIECE FOR “THE MISFITS”
THE MISFITS (LOS RAROS; EXCERPTS)
On Poetry and the Poet
AN EXCERPT FROM “FROM A BOOK OF INTIMATE PAGES”
AN EXCERPT FROM “THE LITERARY LIFE”
THE 1001 NIGHTS
MARINETTI AND FUTURISM
On Art
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE - The Influence of the Sense of Beauty
RANVIER - “The Infancy of Bacchus”
On Himself
THE COLORS OF MY STANDARD
PRO DOMO MEA
THE JOURNALIST AND HIS LITERARY MERITS
On “Modern Life” and Politics
MUSINGS ON CRIME
TO THE RIGHT REVEREND ABBOT SCHNEBELIN
GOLD’S CHOLER
IRON
THE TRIUMPH OF CALIBAN
THE HIPPOGRIFF
TO THE VENERABLE JOAN OF ORLEANS
Travel Pieces and Vignettes
VIEUX PARIS
[ON WOMAN]
THE POSTER IN SPAIN (EXCERPTS)
A DIPLOMATIC MISSION
¡TOROS! (EXCERPTS)
“BLACK SPAIN”
SEVILLE
CÓRDOBA
[TRAVELS IN ITALY]
HAMBURG, OR THE LAND OF SWANS
THE SECESSION
BUDAPEST
APPENDIX SELECTED LETTERS
GLOSSARY
Index of Titles and First Lines
Introduction
“In truth, I live on poetry. I am naught but a man of art.” Thus Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan homme de lettres and indisputable leader of the Modernista movement that swept Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, characterized himself. “I am good for nothing else,” he went on. “I believe in God, and I am attracted to mystery. I am befuddled by daydreams and death; I have read many philosophers yet I know not a word of philosophy. I do espouse a certain Epicureanism, of my own sort: let the soul and body enjoy as much as possible on earth, and do everything possible to continue that enjoyment in the next life. Which is to say, je vois la vie en rose.”
At once visionary and agent provocateur, Darío witnessed the arrival of modernity in every aspect of life on this side of the Atlantic: from education to religion, from politics and the arts to science and technology. He wondered: What makes the Spanish language used in the Americas different from the language of the Iberian Peninsula? To what extent are these nascent nations—whose drive toward independence, in geographic terms, began in Mexico in 1810 and spread throughout the hemisphere—really autonomous, really independent of their “motherland”? From what cultural well ought artists and intellectuals in the Americas drink? What set of symbols and motifs might artists and poets call their own? Of course, the questioning was the result of Darío’s discomfort with his surroundings, and it was not free of irony. “I detest the life and times it is my fate to live in,” he declared. Darío was what we might today call “conflicted”; he was constantly pulled in contrary directions. While he felt himself a man of the Americas, at heart he was a cosmopolitan who looked to Europe as his prime source of inspiration, hoping to redeem himself and his people from the morose Spanish culture, which for Latin America had been the only connection to the outside world, but which had fallen into an embarrassing mediocrity. A man of deep Catholic faith, he understood poetry much in the way the Romantics did: as a bridge toward nature and the spiritual world. In searching for motifs to alleviate his sense of loss, he embraced the worldly and very “contemporary” French Symbolists—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine in particular—but he also felt the allure of the pre-Columbian past. “If there is any poetry in our America,” Darío suggested, “it is in the old things; in Palenque and Utatlán, in the Indian of legend and the fine and sensual Inca, and in the great Moctezuma on his golden throne.”
When approached sub specie aeternitatis, the poetry of Latin America appears to be defined by a cyclical battle of opposites: on one side are the Europeanized voices of the so-called aesthetes, whose poetry is disconnected from the social conditions from which it springs; on the other are the practitioners of an engagé art, who believe that the word has the power to change the world. Of course this tension, in some shape or form, lives at the heart of every poet. In Darío’s case, it manifested itself more vividly than in anyone before him in the region, and the way he responded to it left a deep and lasting mark, to the point that one is able to declare, without fear of error, that the overall poetic tradition in the Spanish language on this side of the Atlantic is perfectly divisible into two halves: before and after Darío.
If the contribution of a single poet could be measured quantitatively, by the number of astonishing poems that have become an essential feature of a culture, then it is arguable that Darío stands as the most important poet ever to write in Latin America. From “Venus” to “Autumn Poem” and “Swans,” from “Poets! Towers of God!” to “To Columbus” and “To Roosevelt,” Darío achieves a pitch so faultless, a melodious style so controlled and authoritative, and a mannered tone, filled with Gallicisms, so influential not only to his successors but his contemporaries as well, as to make the reader believe that these pieces are integral to the universal order of Spanish-language letters. All artists dream of achieving perfection, but only a few might be said to succeed in their quest. Darío, in a handful of his compositions, makes the cut.
The first piece of criticism on Darío’s work appeared in 1884, when he was twenty-one years old. Since then, he has been the subject of a veritable academic industry. Hundreds of book-length studies and thousands of monographs have been written by scholars on Darío. He has been a lightning rod for the Modernista movement that swept the intellectual world of Latin America as the nineteenth century came to a close. (It is no secret that most of these academic examinations tend to be innocuous, jingoistic, and altogether inundated by a hygienic theoretical jargon that specializes in killing the power of poetry. At times one feels that these exercises do little to explain his legacy.) Scholars have delved into the minutiae of his biography and his oeuvre, exploring every imaginable aspect of it from a myriad of perspectives, from the sociological to the political, from the philosophical to the semantic. Special emphasis has been placed on Darío’s links to figures in world literature, with detailed concentration on his borrowings from the French intellectual orbit.
Beyond university circles, however, Darío’s posterity is nothing if not contested, and often the assessment of Darío’s legacy is so passionate as to be belligerent. Throughout his life not only was he often attacked for being either too daring or too imitative of foreign models, but his poetic revolution was also misunderstood. For some critics, such as philologist Raimundo Lida, Darío was not only the most admirable of all the Modernista poets but also one of the great modern Latin-American poets. And in an obituary published in 1916, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the Dominican literary critic who delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1940-41, was the first to equate Darío with Spain’s two major Golden Age poets, Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora. Federico García Lorca, in a conversation with Pablo Neruda at the PEN Club in Buenos Aires in 1933, argued, lyrically, that Darío “gave us the murmur of the forest in an adjective, and as masterful as Fray Luis de Granada, he made zodiacal signs out of the lemon tree, the hoof of a stag, and mollusks filled with terror and infinity. He launched us on the sea with frigates and shadows in our eyes, and built an enormous promenade of gin over the grayest afternoon the sky has ever known, and greeted the southwest wind as a friend, all heart like a Romantic poet, and put his hand on the Corinthian capital of all epochs with a sad, ironic doubt.” Pablo Neruda responded: Darío’s “red name deserves to be remembered, along with his essential tendencies, his terrible heartaches, his incandescent uncertainties, his descent into the hospitals of hell, his ascent to the castles of fame, his attributes as a great poet, now and forever undeniable.” Neruda added: “Federico García Lorca, a Spaniard, and I, a Chilean, dedicate the honors bestowed on us today to that great shadow who sang more loftily than ourselves, and who saluted, in a new voice, the Argentine soil that we now tread.”
