Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (6 page)

 

This, clearly, is a defiant ideological poem. But it also strikes a religious chord, for Darío ends it by telling Roosevelt: “And you think you have it all, but one thing is missing: God!” In this sense it showcases a view of the United States that is nearsighted: the Nicaraguan sees Latin America as a site where faith is essential, unlike its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, which he portrays, mistakenly, as less devout. Did Darío not understand the principal puritan beliefs? Significantly, his North American idols, as stated before, are Whitman and Poe. But what about Emerson and even Hawthorne? Was it his troubled Catholicism that made it impossible for him to connect with a core Protestant constituency north of the Rio Grande?

In 1848, almost half a century before the Spanish-American War, the United States, by signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, acquired a large portion of Mexico’s territory—largely what today is known as the Southwestern states. What were Darío’s views on the Mexican population in places like Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico? He ignored it. And yet, in “To Roosevelt,” he announced that Spanish America, in spite of American imperialism, is alive and well. And in the poem “The Swans,” he reiterates this view but also foresees, tangentially, the growth of a Latino community within the United States. His view is not comforting, though. Should this demographic transformation be applauded or condemned, he wonders? Herein two crucial stanzas:

 

Seen from another perspective, this poem, also part of
Cantos de vida y esperanza,
brings Darío back to his enduring symbol, the swan, made famous in
Azul
. . . What tigers and mirrors are to Borges, what houses and the ocean are to Neruda, the swan is to Darío. But in 1905 the poet’s act of return makes the bird less a chimera and an artifact of fairy tales than an outright symbol, though, at this stage in his life, the swan is a symbol infused with a political pathos. Darío announces: “What sign do you form, oh, Swan, with the curve of your neck’s shape / when the wandering dreamers who are filled with grief pass by? / Why is it you are silent, white, lovely in this landscape, / a tyrant to these waters, heartless to these flowers? Why?”

However,
Cantos de vida y esperanza
also includes the poem “Poets! Towers of God!”, in which Darío establishes, once and for all, his Pythagorean approach to poetry and poets:

 

The rest of the stanzas emphasize Darío’s opinion that “while on one side a poet leans toward nature, and in that he approaches the estate of the plastic artist, on the other side, he is of the race of priests, and in that he rises toward the divine.” For this reason, the poem is a manifesto: an elegy to poetry as the seeker of harmony. It is also a hymn to elitism.

 

Darío was quite productive in his last decade of life. At just the moment he was unsuccessfully trying, from his post as a diplomat in Spain, to annul his marriage to Rosario Murillo and, as Francisca was giving birth to Rubén Darío Sánchez, nicknamed Guicho, Darío himself was publishing, in 1907,
El canto errante
. This is a volume in which Darío comes to terms with his own mortality, a subject that is part of the poem “Lo fatal” (Destined to Die) but that increasingly permeates all his work as he approaches his end. By our standards, he was still young. But unhealthy habits (alcohol, visits to prostitutes) got the best of him. Not surprisingly, though, his physical decline encouraged his poetic ambition. His next collection,
Poema de otoño y otros poemas
(Autumn Poem and Other Poems), released in 1910, includes pieces about death and eternal peace. For instance, the poem “Vesperal” includes these lines:

 

Darío seems to ask: Might I claim for myself a place in Western civilization as a whole? The answer in his view was inconclusive, yet he did not give up his quest. He recognized at that point his enormous influence over Spanish-language poetry, the way he had brought fresh life into a culture known, until him, for its allergy to innovation. Symbolically, the image of Jesus Christ is solidly present in his poetry of the period. His poem “To Columbus,” included in
El canto errante,
was written some years earlier to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the Genoese admiral’s voyage across the Atlantic. He portrays the navigator as a bringer of misery to the Americas, and he indicts him for the abuses. But he also sees Columbus’s messianic ghost wandering the continent, a witness of his own atrocities:

 

A couple of years later Darío brought out
Alfonso XIII
and
El viaje a Nicaragua e Intermezzo tropical
(Voyage to Nicaragua and Tropical Intermezzo), after which he released his collection
Poema del otoño y otros poemas
(Autumn Poems and Other Poems). His health deteriorated rapidly in the years following World War I. It is no secret that he was drinking heavily. His alcoholism often spiraled out of control and got the better of him. Finally his cirrhosis 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. The title poem—the longest in a long career—was written in 1910 and includes material that deals with the social and commercial changes occurring in Latin America in the early part of the twentieth century, especially the dramatic changes Argentina had undergone in order to become modern. For instance, Darío refers to the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who had arrived in Argentina and settled in communes in the province of Entre Ríos and elsewhere. Overall, this is a panoramic piece about freedom and independence. It includes these stanzas:

 

This poem allows modern readers to see Dario’s views of minorities. It is indisputable that by our standards, his views are, to use the jargon of our own day, politically incorrect. His opinion of Jews, for instance, is troubling. While in a portion of “Canto a la Argentina” that is not included in this volume, he commands:
in a poem called “Israel” his portrait of Jews rotates around their need to believe in Christ. Likewise, he approached blacks as inferior people. And while he idealized the pre-Columbian past, he never directly addressed the plight of the indigenous people contemporary to him. Still, within Nicaragua his relatively enlightened attitude was appreciated. Pablo Antonio Cuadra, arguably one of the most significant post-
Rubenista
poets in Nicaragua, who died in 2002, argued: “Darío was the first in the tradition of our
literatura culta,
the nation’s high-brow letters, not only to point to
lo indio
as a fountain of literary originality and authenticity but also to proclaim, against the complexes and prejudices of his age,
mestizo
pride.”

As a whole the issue of minorities in Darío is a controversial one and is in need of revaluation. Clearly, it is intimately linked in Latin America to questions of class. How did he view the difference between whiteness and brownness, between the Europeanized elite in Central America whose roots were in the Iberian Peninsula, and the rest of the population? What about immigration and the effort at the end of the nineteenth century by various governments on this side of the Atlantic to “recolonize” the provinces by opening the doors to Italian, German, and Jewish newcomers? Similarly, it is important to reassess Darío’s understanding of the duality between center and periphery, which I glanced at earlier on in this introduction. To what extent did his “colonial” mentality become the engine that made him conquer Spain by storm? And what is one to say about his approach to sex, death, and the human body in general? The reader of Darío’s prose in particular is likely to find an unsettling answer to this question.

In the end, though, what was the secret of Darío’s success? He himself answered the question thus: “My success—it would be absurd not to confess it—has been due to novelty. . . . And this novelty, what has it consisted of? A mental gallicism. When I read Groussac I did not know he was a Frenchman writing in Spanish. But he taught me to
think in French
; after that, my young, happy heart claimed Gallic citizenship.” As World War I was raging, Darío published the first of three volumes of his selected poems, which he himself chose and organized. It appeared in Madrid under the auspices of Biblioteca Corona:
Muy siglo XVIII
(And Those that Come from the Eighteenth Century, 1914). Two other volumes followed, completing a trilogy in which Darío sought to reconfigure his work thematically. These were
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). It was around the time of the third volume’s publication that Darío fell gravely ill during a lecture tour of the United States. He returned to León, Nicaragua, early in 1916, where he underwent various surgical operations. He died on February 6, 1916, and was buried near the statue of Saint Paul, in the Cathedral of León.

His “contradictory identities,” as they’ve been described, had by then placed Nicaragua, a minuscule Central American nation of approximately 120,254 square kilometers—roughly the size of Vermont—and a population today of a little over five million people, on the cultural map, even though, as David Whisnant put it in
Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua,
Darío’s supporters and opponents in the country have seldom been able “either to tolerate or to process the complex nuances and contradictions of his thought and work.” Still, to this day his contribution is seen, internally, not only as a literary hiatus but as a veritable geopolitical transformation. Pablo Antonio Cuadra emphasized this when he wrote: “A country must compare the benefit of its great poets to that of its great ports.” Cuadra compared Darío to New York. “The number of connections, the amount of knowledge, and the ethical and aesthetic values that came to Nicaragua through Rubén are incommensurable.”

 

Efforts at translating Darío into other languages date back to the last third of his career. French culture, obviously, was fitted for his vision. His poems and nonfiction were appearing in magazines in Paris by the first years of the twentieth century. He was also translated into Portuguese, German, and Italian, among other European languages. In English, his career has not always been a happy one. His rhythmic stanzas establish a sort of symmetry between form and content that is quite difficult to recapture in Shakespeare’s tongue. Still, there have been efforts made, especially since the sixties, to render the Nicaraguan in a convincing way.

This anthology represents the most ambitious attempt ever to make the Nicaraguan poet comfortable in English. A selection of the most representative prose, stories and fables, and journalism, and a dozen letters to relatives and friends, are featured together with the poetry for the first time. Intriguingly, this volume also brings together different translation strategies. The compilation is divided into two parts, each briefly prefaced by its respective translators. The first section is devoted to poetry and it appears in bilingual format. The English renditions are by Greg Simon and Steven F. White. The organization is thematic rather than chronological. Instead of representing the arc of Darío’s poetry from his debut to his posthumous stanzas, the material is showcased in the way Darío himself arranged it when he released the three volumes published in Madrid by Biblioteca Corona between 1914 and 1916. Three sections are titled after lines he had used early in
Cantos de vida y esperanza
and they represent modalities of his temperament, so to speak: a connection with the past, his urbane worldview, his transition as a modern voice, and his philosophical and religious pursuits. A fourth section is an intelligent approximation to yet another section Darío might have intended to publish but was unable to do so before he died. Darío’s development as a poet is of primary importance in the Spanish-speaking world. When did he first come across motifs like the swan and the princess? In what kinds of rhythmic experimentation did he engage at various stages of his career? In order to give even a vague semblance of his aesthetic transformation, there are dates of composition in brackets after each of the Spanish originals. When the date is preceded by a “p,” it means the information is lacking and the date included is that of publication in book form. Some of the dates are a range of years; this is a reference to Darío’s uncollected poetry, known to scholars as “
poesía dispersa
.”