Table of Contents
RUBN DARO : SELECTED WRITINGS
RUBN DARO (Flix Garca Sarmiento) was born in Metapa (renamed Ciudad Daro), 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 Daro was raised in Len. 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 Termmetro. In 1884, Daro worked as a presidential staff member under the regime of Adn Crdenas, 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, Daro began contributing to the Argentine daily La Nacin, a professional relationship that would last until his death. In Nicaragua, he married Rafaela Contreras Caas, the first of three wives with whom he would have four children, two of whom died in infancy. A coup detat in Nicaragua in 1890 forced him to move to Guatemala and El Salvador. Daro was named secretary of the Nicaraguan delegation in charge of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbuss voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1892 and also made his first, revelatory trip to Spain. Rafaela Contreras Caas died soon after. Months later, Daro married Rosario Murillo. In 1893 Daro met Paul Verlaine in Paris, and, in New York, Jos Mart, 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 Flauberts Salamb. In 1898 the Spanish-American War took place and shook Daro 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 Espaa contempornea [Contemporary Spain] (1901). In 1899 he met Ramn Mara Valle-Incln, Juan Ramn Jimnez, as well as Francisca Snchez, an illiterate peasant from Navalsuz, whom Daro taught to read. The couple relocated in Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for La Nacin, 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]. Daro 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 otoo 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 Jos Madriz was deposed, and Daro 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 Nacin 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 Thats Endless] (1916). His autobiography, La vida de Rubn Daro escrita por l mismo [The Life of Rubn Daro, Written by Himself], appeared in 1915. He became gravely ill during a lecture tour of the United States, and returned to Len, Nicaragua, early in 1916. Rubn Daro died on February 6, 1916. He was buried near the statue of Saint Paul, in the Cathedral of Len.
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 Borgess Collected Fictions (1998), as well as Reinaldo Arenass 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 Garca Lorcas 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 ms que humano en la poesa de Pablo Antonio Cuadra: Un estudio ecocrtico (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).
Introduction
In truth, I live on poetry. I am naught but a man of art. Thus Rubn Daro, 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, Daro 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 nationswhose drive toward independence, in geographic terms, began in Mexico in 1810 and spread throughout the hemispherereally 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 Daros 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. Daro 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 SymbolistsBaudelaire, Mallarm, and Verlaine in particularbut he also felt the allure of the pre-Columbian past. If there is any poetry in our America, Daro suggested, it is in the old things; in Palenque and Utatln, in the Indian of legend and the fine and sensual Inca, and in the great Moctezuma on his golden throne.
