Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (67 page)

Heinsius, Daniel:
(1580-1655) One of the greatest of the scholars of the Dutch Renaissance, Heinsius was a professor of Greek and Latin, composed poetry and essays in Latin, and translated many classical authors.

Hello, Ernest:
(France; 1828-1885) French journalist, staunchly Catholic, who founded a journal of Catholic defense but later freelanced. Published several large religious volumes, among them the
Physiognomies of the Saints
referred to by Darío.

Hercules:
The son of Zeus and the mortal queen Alcmene, who named him “glorious gift of Hera,” after the wife of Zeus. He was renowned for his prodigious feats of strength, one of which was to strangle two snakes sent to his crib by an angry Hera. Hercules also killed the lion of Nemea, and in Book IX of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
won a memorable battle against a shape-changing sea-god named Achelous which set in motion the revenge-driven death of Achilles.

Heredia, José María de:
(Cuba; 1842-1905) Son of a Spanish father and French mother, Heredia was educated in France and lived in Paris. He studied law, but soon abandoned it for literature. He was one of the first PARNASSIANS. In 1894 he was named to the French Academy.

Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice-great Hermes”):
Name originally given by the Neoplatonists to the Egyptian god Thoth, but later applied to the putative author of a body of alchemical and occult writings; thus, a great, if only legendary, alchemist. The French Symbolists reawakened interest in the Hermetic writings (and W. B. Yeats gave them some importance in English-language literature); the writings are an amalgam of Egyptian magical writings, Jewish mysticism, and Platonism.

Hernández, José:
(Argentina; 1834-1886) The last of the
gauchesco
poets, and author of the famous
Martín Fierro.
Not influential on later literature, but immensely quoted and talked about by both admirers and detractors.

Herod:
(d. 40 A.D.) Known as Herod Antipas. Tetrarch of Galilee, son of Herod the Great. He divorced his wife in order to marry his niece, HERODIAS, who was also the ex-wife of his own half-brother. According to the Gospel of Mark, John the Baptist criticized the king for this marriage, and was consequently killed. Herod ended his life in exile in Gaul.

Herodias:
Matthew 14, 1-10: “For Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him and put him in prison for Herodias’ sake, his brother Philip’s wife. For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to have her. And when he would have put him to death, he feared the multitude, because they counted him as a prophet.”

Hugo, Victor Marie:
(1802-1885) French poet, novelist, dramatist, and leader of the Romantic movement in France. Unquestionably one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century in European literature, and one of the greatest ever in France, Hugo as a poet experimented with rhythms and language, yet, spurning any idea of “art for art’s sake,” he believed in the poet’s responsibility as a leader of the people (a Romantic notion
par excellence
). His novels today strike most readers as quite melodramatic, but they are concerned with the great drama to be found in the lives of common people (in novels such as
Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
etc.). As a playwright, he broke from classicism and asserted the poet’s right to experiment with mixtures of the comic and tragic (seen much in Darío), the use of colloquial dialogue, etc. Plays include
Hernani, Ruy Blas, Le Roi s’amuse
(which became Verdi’s
Rigoletto
), and
Cromwell
(mentioned by Darío), whose preface became a manifesto for Romantic drama.

Huysmans, Joris Karl:
(1847-1907) A Frenchman of Dutch ancestry, Huysmans was the leader of the French DECADENTS (
q.v.
). He himself was neurasthenic and perverse in his tastes, and his works are marked by an exquisite sensitivity, with fantastic descriptions, a great deal of the exaggerated and grotesque, and, when “naturalistic,” sordid settings and situations. Today he is perhaps best known for his semi-autobiographical work Là-Bas and his novel
A
Rebours
(
Against the Grain
), whose hero DES ESSEINTES, sick with ennui, goes in search of the rare and perverse and finds it in perfumes, music, painting, circus acrobats, and medieval Latin literature.

Hypsipyla:
Although Hipsipyle was a queen of Lemnos who is associated with Jason and the Argonauts, the reference in “Böklin” is to a brown-winged moth, Hypsipyla, which actually is a pest, harmful especially to the South and Central American mahogany tree.

Jaimes Freire, Ricardo:
(Bolivia, nationalized Argentina, 1916; 1868-1933) One of the “second” generation of
modernista
followers of Darío, Jaimes Freire was an ardent experimenter with rhythms in verse and with
vers libre
; he wrote a manual of versification in Spanish in which he concluded that free verse should be the basis of all poetry written in Spanish. In 1894, with Darío, whom he considered his teacher and mentor, he founded the influential
Revista de América.
He was also a great friend of the master poet LEOPOLDO LUGONES.

James [St.]:
(d. 44 A.D.) Santiago Matamoros, St. James the Moor-Killer, was an early Christian martyr called in a vision from his tomb to help the Christian population of Spain resist the Moorish invasion of 711.

Janus:
Two-faced Roman god (or Numen) of gates and doors, beginnings and endings. He is represented with a double-faced head, each side looking in opposite directions.

Jason:
In Greek mythology, a warrior-prince who led the Argonauts on their quest for the Golden Fleece. The victim of a hereditary struggle over the throne of Thessaly, Jason was raised in exile by the wife of the centaur Chiron, who taught him the art of medicine.

Jiménez, Juan Ramón:
(1881-1957) Exiled Spanish poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1956 while living in Puerto Rico. Darío and Jiménez were lifelong friends and correspondents.

Jokai, Maurus:
(1825-1904) Hungarian nationalist, novelist and poet. The 1911
Encyclopaedia Britannica
describes him in this way: “Jokai was an arch-romantic, with a perfervid Oriental imagination, and humour of the purest, rarest description. If one can imagine a combination, in almost equal parts, of Walter Scott, William Beckford, Dumas père, and Charles Dickens, together with the native originality of an ardent Magyar, one may perhaps form a fair idea of the great Hungarian romancer’s indisputable genius.”

Joris-Karl: (
See
HUYSMANS
.)

Junín:
Site of a famous battle in the South American wars of independence; the Battle of Junín took place in the then-department of Peru, where, on August 6, 1824, a cavalry engagement was fought between Simón Bolívar’s nationalist forces and the royalist forces under José de Canterac. The tide was turning against the independence forces until the royalist rear was attacked by a force of Hussars under the command of Isidoro Suárez—coincidentally, one of the forebears of Jorge Luis Borges.

Klimt, Gustav:
(Austria; 1862-1918) The principal exponent of the
Jugendstil
(“young style,” which in France was called Art Nouveau) and one of the founders of the Vienna SECESSION and the Wiener Werkstätte. Though essentially a decorator, his paintings after 1898, influenced by Japanese art and some modern painters, have become touchstones of the Art Nouveau and Secessionist schools.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard Freiherr von:
(Germany; 1840-1902) German psychiatrist who wrote the (in)famous
Psychopathia Sexualis
(1886), a study of sexual perversity dealing with fetishism, sadism, masochism, etc. Born in Mannheim and educated in Prague, Krafft-Ebing studied medicine at Heidelberg. After specializing in psychiatry, he worked in several asylums, but was discouraged by the treatment received by the inmates there and so went into private practice. Many passages in
Psychopathia Sexualis
are written in Latin, “to discourage lay readers.” After interviews with many male and female homosexuals, Krafft-Ebing came to the conclusion that homosexuality was not a mental illness or perversion, but he did see it as a psycho-physiological “anomaly” that occurred during gestation of the fetus. In 1901 he rephrased the idea, saying that homosexuality stemmed from a “differentiation” during gestation. This nonpathological position was overshadowed by Freud’s, but has now, of course, won the day.

Laforgue, Jules:
(France; 1860-1887) A Symbolist poet and the “inventor” of
vers libre,
or free verse, Laforgue had considerable influence on Anglo-American Modernist poetry and fiction: Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Stephen Crane, Wallace Stevens.

Lanier, Sidney:
(U.S.; 1842-1881) A Southerner, like POE, and like Poe concerned especially with musical effects in poetry (though not the “sensationalism” that Poe generally employs in his subject matter); thus, for Darío, Lanier is interesting for his formal poetics and for his poetry itself, which is similar to that of the Pre-Raphaelites, who often employed situations and characters from the English Middle Ages (Arthurian legend, etc.) in a rich and luxuriant style, or rather heavily moralizing Christian messages.

Larva:
In Latin, “evil spirit, demon, devil”; this is a word that corresponds to the modern “ghost,” but with more sinister implications. Because in Middle Latin the word came to signify a (terrifying) mask, it came to be used for the “larval” stage of insects, the mask before the true form was revealed. Here, however, Darío is casting back to Old Latin to mean a specter or horrible night creature.

Laujol, Henri (
pseudonym of
Henry Roujon): (France; 1853-1914) Though Roujon began studies in the law, he quickly abandoned them for a life as an educator in the Ministry of Public Education; in 1876, he was named to the Bureau of Primary (Elementary) Education. Over the next quarter century, he rose in the ranks of the bureau, and soon was made director of Fine Arts, a position he held until the year of his death. Outside his salaried professional life, Roujon became known as Laujol: He was first a contributor and then editor of the
République des Lettres,
a review founded by Catulle MENDÈS, and was famed for his caustic and humorous book and theater reviews. He also contributed to
Le Figaro
and
Le Temps.
He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor and elected to the Académie Française.

Le Gallienne, Richard:
Darío gives this author’s name as “Richar” Le Gallienne, but that spelling is erroneous. Le Gallienne (1866-1947) collaborated in
The Yellow Book
series but was, indeed, given to the more “spiritual” aspects of the late Romantic movement.

Le Poer, Arnold (Sir):
(?-1329) Seneschal of Kilkenny, Ireland, who defended one Dame Alice Kyteler (“the sorceress of Kilkenny”) against charges of witchcraft. In the events leading up to the trial, Sir Arnold, an extremely powerful man and probably related to Dame Alice’s fourth husband, attempted to persuade the civil and ecclesiastical authorities to stop their investigation of Dame Alice, accused of murdering her three previous husbands, offering sacrifices of animals to demons, consorting with spirits of the air, having an incubus who had carnal knowledge of her, etc. When persuasion didn’t work, Sir Arnold resorted to threats, and he did indeed slow the investigation, since the bishop who was leading it was put under arrest by the civil authorities. Meantime, Dame Alice had the bishop cited for attempting to excommunicate her without her having been found guilty of heresy or other crimes or sins. The upshot was that when the bishop appeared in Dublin for his hearing, he and Sir Arnold somehow made peace. Learning of this, Dame Alice fled to England, where she was never heard of again.

Le Poer, Roger (Sir):
First, one must say that the name Le Poer (Poher, Pore, Poore, Power, Powere) is a very common one, perhaps derived from the various families’ status of poverty, or a vow of religious poverty. It is a name of Norman origins, and comes to the English Isles in 1066. Second, there were many Rogers prominent enough to figure in history books within the several (sometimes unrelated) families. One Roger was Lord Chancellor of England from 1135 to 1139. Another is reported to have accompanied Henry II when he invaded Ireland in 1171. One was mayor of Waterford (the city of Waterford was early a part of the Le Poer reward from Henry II) in 1179. Are these all the same person? It is difficult to tell, but any or all of them could be the Roger associated with Strongbow that Darío mentions. Another Roger was born ca. 1275, so he is disqualified from that distinction. The list of Rogers continues. However, there are two Le Poers mentioned in histories as accompanying STRONGBOW, one Roger and one Robert, and a Robert Le Poer is said to be mayor of Waterford in 1179. These waters are too muddy to be fished for these notes. One indisputable datum is that Strongbow went into Ireland in 1172, and all agree that a Le Poer accompanied him, later to be rewarded with huge tracts of land in County Waterford.

Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie René:
(France; 1818-1894) PARNASSIAN poet, author of
Poèmes Barbares, Poèmes Antiques, Poèmes Tragiques
; translator of Theocritus, Homer, AESCHYLUS, Sophocles, Euripides, Horace; playwright. He was twice defeated for inclusion among the giants of the French Academy, but the second time Victor Hugo voted for him so ostentatiously that Leconte is quoted as saying, “Victor Hugo’s vote is equivalent to my election; I shall not present my name again.” Indeed, he succeeded to Hugo’s chair on Hugo’s death. His verses are “clear, sonorous, dignified, deliberate in movement, classically correct in rhythm, full of exotic local color, of savage names, of realistic rhetoric” (
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
1911). “Coldness,” however, “cultivated as a kind of artistic distinction, seems to turn all his poetry to marble . . . ; most of [his] poems are little chill epics, in which legend is fossilized.”