Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (3 page)

 

Rubén Darío was born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento on January 18, 1867, in Metapa, a small town in what is now the municipality of Matagapa in Nicaragua. (It was eventually renamed Ciudad Darío.) His pen name, like that of Neruda (born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto), was adopted later: it combines his second forename and the second last name of his father, Manuel García Darío. (His mother was Rosa Sarmiento Alemán.) He was baptized a Christian. His parents separated soon after his birth. His mother took him to Honduras, but eventually returned to Nicaragua, where Darío was raised in León.

In his autobiography, published in 1915 and known in Spanish as
La vida de Rubén Darío escrita por él mismo
(The Life of Rubén Darío, Written by Himself), a volume which, as critics have pointed out, is filled with deliberate omissions as well as unintended errors, Darío reflected on the colonial landscape that surrounded him as a child. León, he said, was filled with cupolas, stone-paved streets, and fortresses. There were legends of decapitated priests on horses running wild; relatives would tell him ghost stories. Clearly, these stories and this setting instilled in him a sense of mystery and even religious devotion.

Anecdotes about Darío’s precociousness abound. He himself stated that he learned to read at the age of three. And in his autobiography he tells us that at ten he discovered in a closet the first books he would read; among them were the Bible,
Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights,
works by Cicero and Madame de Staël, and a volume of Golden Age Spanish comedies. He attended public school but also studied at the Iglesia de la Recolección in León under the tutelage of the Jesuits—who had been expelled from Guatemala. It was also in those early years that he began to write poetry; as he put it, “I would never commit a single error in rhythm.” Shortly after, Darío, at eleven, was writing epitaphs in verse on commission. His first poems were actually published in periodicals when he was thirteen years old; the newly formed newspaper
El Termómetro
featured a number of them. By the way, it is also said, implausibly, that before he reached twenty years of age Darío knew the entire
Diccionario de la Real Academia Española
by heart.

In 1884, at seventeen, several important events took place in Darío’s life. At this time he was working as a presidential staff member under the regime of Adán Cárdenas, as well as in the National Library. The first life-changing event was Darío’s appointment to what would be the first of several diplomatic posts. The other was the start of his contributions to the Argentine daily
La Nación,
a professional relationship that would last until Darío’s death. And of course Darío’s connection to the library would also prove to be invaluable. Throughout his life, he surrounded himself with books. The act of reading is ubiquitous in him: it appears in his poems, as book-reviewing in his journalism, and as a leitmotif in his prose; he even has a volume called
The Story of My Books
.

It was also at this period that Darío married for the first time, in a ceremony that took place in Nicaragua. His wife was Rafaela Contreras Cañas. She would be the first of three wives, with whom he would have four children, two of them dying in infancy. His first trip out of Nicaragua took him to Chile in 1886. In Chile, Darío found an atmosphere conducive to his revolutionary aesthetics, and in fact it was here that he made his debut as a poet in book form, with
Abrojos
in 1887. But it was
Azul
. . . (
Azure
), a tiny volume published by Imprenta y Litografía Excelsior in Valparaíso—a thriving Chilean city of a hundred thousand citizens at the time—that not only remained one of Darío’s all-time personal favorites but almost overnight made him famous in the Spanish-speaking world and turned him into the consummate leader of the
Modernistas
. The volume, combining poetry and prose, vies with Borges’s
Ficciones
as the single most influential book-length publication ever to appear in Latin America. (
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
by Gabriel García Márquez, is next in importance.) Reaction to the book was mixed, but on balance gratifying. “I was greeted with incomprehension, astonishment, and censure from the professors, but cordial applause from my companions,” Darío wrote. What made the volume so terribly important? “My success—it would be absurd not to confess it—has been due to novelty.” He went on to explain:

 

It is the elements of French culture that make Darío tick. In 1899 he wrote in a letter to the Iberian philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: “I am embarrassed to admit it, but I do not think in Castillian Spanish. Rather, I think in French! Or, better still, I think
ideographically,
which is why my work is not ‘pure.’ I am referring to my most recent books. My first works, up to
Azul . . . ,
come from an undeniably Spanish stock, at least in their form.” While Paris was Darío’s center of cultural gravity, one ought to keep in mind that he was imagining the metropolis from his sojourns in Nicaragua and Chile. He would never be more Parisian than when he was still unacquainted with Paris, imagining its landscape through readings of his favorite authors. Notice also the use of the ellipsis after
Azul . . .
: Darío seems to invite the reader to enter with him that realm of dreams he is so eagerly striving for. His Catholic worldview had, as its counterpoint in the poetry, heterodox, pagan concepts. He styled himself a dilettante, and all in all succeeded in mastering that “profession.” The poetic and prose experiments followed a similar approach: “the application to Spanish of certain verbal superiorities from other languages, in this case mainly French,” Darío explained. For yes, the material is aristocratic in nature; it is also unapologetically erudite. The author exploits the etymology of words. He lets his style be driven by a melodious inner voice, focusing on rhythm not only in his stanzas, which are governed by syllabic meter, but also in his prose.

Azul . . .
contains classic pieces like “About Winter” and “To a Poet.” And in a literary mode that Darío would repeatedly return to, he included in this volume what he called
medallones,
a text written in homage—in the form of an ornament, a medallion—to an influential figure, Whitman for instance. Darío saw the good gray poet simultaneously as an emperor and a priestly presence who strove toward true democracy by encouraging the sailor to row, the eagle to fly, and the laborer to work. Darío praised Whitman in this way:

 

Yes, much like Borges and Neruda after him, Darío thoroughly admired Whitman. The very name of the American master required him to take a breath. “Whitman, maestro Whitman,” sighed the Nicaraguan poet, “broke all the rules and, guided by instinct, went back to the Hebrew line. And I must concur with the diagnosis of the Jew Nordau with respect to the immense poet of
Leaves of Grass,
that rare, strange—passing strange,
degenerate
—Whitman, yet honored, too, Maeterlinck’s master, that strong, cosmic Yankee. We, dear maestro, the young poets of the Spanish Americas, are preparing the way, because our own Whitman must be soon to come, our indigenous Walt Whitman, filled with the world, saturated with the universe, like that other Whitman of the north, chanted so beautifully by ‘our’ Martí. And no one would be surprised if in this vast cosmopolis, this alembic of souls and races, where Andrade of the symbolic
Atlántida
lived his life and this young savage Lugones has just appeared, there might appear some precursor of that poet heralded by the enigmatic and terrible Montevideo madman, in his prophetic and terrifying book.”

In this Penguin Classics anthology,
azul,
“blue” in Spanish, is not translated as blue. As Andrew Hurley suggests in his translator’s note to the section of stories and fables, the alternative choice,
azure,
is closer in spirit to Darío’s intention: while avoiding associations with “the blues” and “being blue,” it foregrounds an association Darío made with fairy tales (“
cuentos azules”
in Spanish) filled with princesses, castles, and knights in shining armor (or “Prince Charmings,”
“principes azules,”
literally “blue knights,” in Spanish). The title of that first influential collection, in Darío’s view, pointed to the color of daydreams, an azure found in the work of Victor Hugo, “the color of art, a Hellenic, Homeric color, a color oceanic and firmamental, the
coeruleum
which in Pliny is the simple color that resembles the sky, and sapphires.”

In any case,
Azul
. . . ought to be read as an itinerary of sorts, announcing the direction Darío would take in his life-long oeuvre. Most of the attention it commands comes from its crystalline stanzas. But it also contains stories such as “The Bourgeois King,” subtitled “A Cheering Tale,” about a pompous monarch who hires a poet to play the organ in his garden parties, “near the swans.” The fairy tales function as an excuse for Darío to analyze two social types: an emerging bourgeoisie in Latin America, uninterested in art, and the artist with lofty ideals. The poet is clearly Darío’s alter ego. He states: “My lord, for long years I have sung the word of the future. I was born in the time of the dawn and I have spread my wings in the hurricane. I seek the chosen race that awaits, with hymns upon their lips and lyres in their hands, the rising of the great sun. . . .” And: “I have caressed great Nature, and I have sought, in the warmth of the ideal, the verse that lies in the star at the end of the heavens, the pearl in the depths of ancient Ocean. I have sought to boom, to crash! For the age of the great revolutions is coming, with a Messiah that is all Light, and Agitation, and Power, and we must receive his spirit with a poem that is a triumphal arch, with lines of iron, and lines of gold, and lines of love.” The survival of this hungry artist depends on the bourgeois king. At the end of the story, Darío has him perish “thinking that the sun would rise the next day, and with it, the ideal . . . and that art would wear not wool pants, but a mantle of gold, and flames. . . . And the next day the king and his courtiers found him there, the poor devil of a poet, like a swallow frozen in the ice, with a bitter smile on his lips.”

In comparison with Darío’s poetry, his stories have commanded limited attention. They are skillfully written, but they suffer for their ambitions, in that they rarely generate the genuine psychological terror achieved by Poe and Stevenson, and also from the fact that their author died too soon to benefit, as Borges did so exotically, from the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. Still, they are marvelous in the traditional sense of the term: filled with precious marvels. And they ought to be read in their own historical context. As a fin-de-siècle literari, Darío employed images and symbols, much in the way the nineteenth-century Romantics did. He wasn’t interested in plot. Instead, his objective was to communicate “truths.” What makes him so compelling, I would argue, is his perversity—perversity of spirit, sexual perversity. In “The Ruby,” for instance, the precious stone is created by means of the blood of a woman that has been kidnapped and maybe raped. Thus, the gems that result from it are dependent on violence, wounding, abuse, violation of all sorts. There is also the dance-read-as-sexual-dalliance of “The Palace of the Sun,” the “murder” of art by a jealous wife in “The Death of the Empress of China,” and “El Fardo” and countless other similar stories in which the artist-figure is insensitive to the pain of others. It is in his stories that Darío is at his most Decadent and the humanistic paradigm is inverted. For what is Decadence if not a form of writing obsessed with style, in which the subject tends toward the perverse, dark, and sinful, and in which sensation is more important than morality? In his fiction Darío does tend to be overly allegorical for the pre-Chekhov and pre-Joyce reader, delegating plot to a secondary role and coming up with characters that might serve as mouthpieces for/of his aesthetic and other ideas. This, after all, is what the French short story was at the time, and the short story often written in English when Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were active. Such is the case of “The Deaf Satyr,” also in
Azul
. . . , a Greek story set on Mount Olympus, in which the poet Orpheus sings his songs in the woods. Orpheus, the poet, “sickened by mankind’s misery,” decides to seek refuge in the woods, “where the trees and rocks might understand him and listen to him in ecstasy, and where, when he played his lyre, he might make all things tremble with harmony and the fire of love.” He sings his song to a deaf satyr, who, following his ass’s advice, exiles Orpheus from the woods. Again, the portrait of the artist is disheartening: the poet, seeking communion with nature and community, finds only rejection.

 

In the preceding pages I have spoken, time and again, about the
Modernista
revolution. Let it not be confused with the term
Rubenista,
which means a follower of Darío.
Modernismo
was an ambitious way of reappraising the world. But what was it really about? And why should the term be written in Spanish and italicized? What constitutes an artistic movement? Should
Modernismo
be considered such a movement? These questions, particularly the latter ones, have, again, an embattled quality to them, in tune with the critique Darío faced in life as a
Modernista
. For intellectuals of his time—and scores of others since then—have often suggested that Darío’s poetics encapsulated impossibly disparate ambitions. A new bourgeois sensibility like the one Darío was announcing, an interest in occult religion, a Pythagorean understanding of music and the spiritual realm, and a desire to write Spanish following French syntax are efforts so disparate in their very nature that it seems impossible to bring them together under a single rubric. No wonder Miguel de Unamuno complained in 1918: “I don’t exactly know what this business of
Modernistas
and
Modernismo
is. Such diverse and opposing things are given these names that there is no way to reduce them to a common category.” Others have agreed with Unamuno, arguing that almost a century after Darío’s death—and thus, after the demise of the overall intellectual and social upheaval he expounded—today we still have no clear vision of what it was all about.