Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (7 page)

The second part of this volume, devoted to Darío’s fiction, essays, reportage, and travel writing, has been translated by Andrew Hurley. This section is cataloged not by theme, but rather by genre. It first concentrates on his stories and fables, which include myths and legends, tales of horror and the grotesque, and a handful of prose poems, and then moves to the part of Darío’s work that remains least known in English: his nonfiction, including the pieces on Poe, Verlaine, Martí, Ibsen, and Isidore Ducasse (aka Count of Lautréamont) from
Los raros
. This section also includes op-eds and political pieces on crime, the iron industry, and cosmopolitan life. Translations of Darío’s important forewords to
Azul
. . . , and
Los raros
are also included, as well as Darío’s commentary on Marinetti and futurism and on a new French rendition of
The Book of a Thousand Nights and A Night
. His itinerant pieces on countries he visited, such as Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Hungary are provocative. (It is regrettable that the Nicaraguan never looked at the landscape of the Americas with the same consideration he devoted to Europe.) For him the Old Continent was a destination that piqued his curiosity, whereas this side of the Atlantic Ocean was a mere place of departure. Darío, of course, was a decadent. For him, as for most of his peers in Latin America, a journey to the center of Western Civilization was a rite of passage. (Has this asymmetrical approach finally changed? Perhaps only by expanding the destination to the United States as well. At the end of the twentieth century, a visit to New York, not Paris, was de rigueur for any serious young Mexican, Argentine, Venezuelan, Columbian . . . writer whose goal was to shape a promising career.) Darío’s prose did not go through stylistic changes the way his poetry did, nor did it have the same impact on his readership. In it the Nicaraguan reacts to his immediate circumstance: people, places, books. Chronology is considerably less significant in this, so the material doesn’t include bracketed dates.

I’ve been a devoted reader of his oeuvre since my teens, when I first read
Los raros
during my college years in Mexico and was overwhelmed by his sonnets, memorizing dozens of poems, starting with “
De invierno
” (About Winter) and “
Lo fatal
” (Destined to Die). After I immigrated to the United States in 1985, it became my dream to see Rubén Darío find a space of his own in the English language in a way that wouldn’t make him sound awkward. The power of his verbal art and his astounding influence more than justify the endeavor. It took a long time to complete the task but the energy and encouragement I received from numerous people allowed me—and the team we finally put together—to remain focused. In this volume I did not just seek to introduce Darío in a comprehensive, responsible fashion, offering a context against which to understand his contribution. I also wanted readers to appreciate his polyphonic talents. That polyphony, in my eyes, at least, suggests that there are at least two Daríos, if not more: one a glorious poet, the other an emblematic narrator. Since I wanted him to have as close to a perfect pitch in Shakespeare’s tongue as he has in Cervantes’s, I sought different translators who would be able to give the Nicaraguan the exact touch he requires in the different genres he mastered. Intriguingly, the approaches taken by Simon and White in the poetry part, and by Hurley in its prose counterpart, offer alternative lessons in the art of translation. The reader will quickly notice that the language used in each of these parts is different: for the poetry, the translators have intentionally brought Darío to the present tense, making him current today. Their renditions answer the question: How does this late-nineteenth-century
Modernista
sound to today’s ears? Hurley’s approach moves in the opposite direction, bringing the contemporary reader to the past. He does not reimagine Darío’s fiction and nonfiction using present-day colloquialisms. Instead, he makes use of the English of the time to place the Nicaraguan in a period to which he belongs in chronological terms. Hurley states that “Just as in Spanish Darío reminds one of the English and French writers that were pursuing similar themes and aesthetic concerns at the same time as he (because he was, in fact, ‘translating’ them), so I have wanted Darío, in English, to sit firmly in that tradition. Thus, a ‘timeless’ yet identifiably fin-de-siècle language and style seemed called for, and I simply ‘back-translated’ Darío into a tradition the English reader is already perfectly familiar with.”

This double strategy might be disruptive to some, resulting in a composite picture of Darío that is schizophrenic. But the opposite is true. The Rubén Darío showcased in this anthology is a man for all seasons. It is our duty to appreciate him in full in each and every one of them. After all, he was a polymath, a sum of parts. Why simplify him? Shouldn’t each of those parts command our attention? Neither of the translating methods used in these pages is better than the other. They are mere stratagems, for the translator is also an artist, and an approach to the work depends on an understanding of the world. The same question of approach, I might add, might be faced by a novelist today whose task it is to locate his plot in Dickens’s London: should he recreate the past in content only, making use of the jargon we employ nowadays? Or might it be better to deliver the storyline as if the author of
David Copperfield
had written it himself? As long as each of the approaches is embraced not only thoroughly but convincingly, their worth is indisputable and that, I’m happy to report, is the case in this Penguin Classic volume. I would go as far as to argue that the approach taken for the two parts is precisely the one required. Darío’s poetry tends toward the hermetic. Why eclipse his esoteric views even more by presenting them in a language that is alien to readers today? Why make his poetic remoteness even more isolated? Conversely, his stories, legends and journalism were often written on deadline, are originally meant for a wider readership. This, it strikes me, is reason enough to use them as a springboard to understand Darío’s frame of mind as well as the type of language he used and the age in which he lived.

Translation was a topic that concerned Darío dearly, just as it concerned other giants of Latin American poetry: Borges, Neruda, Vallejo, Paz . . . The Nicaraguan believed that in order to translate a work of poetry, one must be a poet. But Darío did not so much engage in the act and art of translation as read translations devotedly and enthusiastically. Upon reading the J. D. Mardrus rendition of the
1001 Nights,
he commented: “Of myself, I will say that no book has so liberated my spirit from the wearinesses of our common existence, our daily aches and pains, as this book of pearls and gems, magic spells and enchantments, realities so ungraspable and fantasies so real. Its fragrance is sedative, its effluvia calming, its delights refreshing and comforting. Like any modifier of thought, but without the inconveniences of venoms, alcohols, or alkaloids, it offers the gift of an artificial paradise. To read certain tales is to enter a pool of warm rosewater. And in all, there is delight for the five senses—and for others that we hardly suspect.” Obviously the Rubén Darío encountered in the following pages is, inevitably, a reinvented one, a poet remapped in a language not his own. But in my view the collaborative effort is brilliant. It should allow the uninitiated to appreciate the pearls and gems, magic spells and enchantments, as well as the emblematic aesthetic viewpoint this superb
homme de lettres
left for us. His “artificial paradise” is more than worth exploring, for through his oeuvre he surely liberated an entire continent from its own soporific existence.

—Ilan Stavans

Suggestions for Further Reading

Acevedo Marrero, Ramón Luis.
El discurso de la ambigüedad: La narrativa modernista hispanoamericana.
San Juan, P.R.: Isla Negra, 2002.

Anderson Imbert, Enrique.
La originalidad de Rubén Darío.
Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1967.

Arellano, Jorge Eduardo.
Azul . . . de Rubén Darío: Nuevas perspectivas.
Washington, D.C.: Organización de los Estados Americanos, 1993.

Arellano, Jorge Eduardo and José Jirón Terán, eds.
Investigaciones en torno de Rubén Darío.
Managua: Dirección General de Bibliotecas y Archivos, 1981.

Baquero, Gastón.
Darío, Cernuda y otros temas poéticos.
Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1969.

Bourne, Louis.
Fuerza invisible: Lo divino en la poesía de Rubén Darío.
Málaga: Campus de Teatinos, Universidad de Málaga, 1999.

Concha, Jaime.
Rubén Darío.
Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1975.

Cuadra, Pablo Antonio.
Aventura literaria del mestizaje y otros ensayos.
San José, Costa Rica: Libro Libre, 1988.

Darío, Rubén.
Muy siglo xviii.
Madrid: Biblioteca Corona, 1914.

———.
Muy antiguo y muy moderno.
Madrid: Biblioteca Corona, 1915.

—.
Y una sed de ilusiones infinita.
Madrid: Biblioteca Corona, 1916.

———.
Eleven Poems of Rubén Darío.
Trans. by Thomas Walsh and Salomón de la Selva. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916.

———.
Autobiografía.
Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1918.

———.
Epistolario.
Prólogo de Alberto Ghiraldo. Madrid: Biblioteca Rubén Darío, 1932.

———.
Antología poética.
Selección, Estudio Preliminar, Cronología, Notas y Glosario de Arturo Torres Rioseco. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1949.

———.
Cuentos Completos.
Ed. Ernesto Mejía Sánchez. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950.

———.
Obras completas.
4 vols. Ed. by M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez. Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1950.

———.
Poesías completas.
Ed. by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. Madrid: Aguilar, 1961.

———.
Cartas de Rubén Darío. Epistolario inédito del poeta con sus amigos españoles.
Ed. by Dictino Álvarez Hernández. Madrid: Taurus, 1963.

———.
Selected Poems of Rubén Darío.
Trans. by Lysander Kemp. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965.

———.
Antología poética.
Managua: Editorial Hospicio, 1966.

———.
Poesía.
Ed. by Ernesto Mejía Sánchez. Caracas: Ayacucho, 1977.

———.
Opiniones.
Managua: Nueva Nicaragua, 1990.

———. “Número monográfico dedicado a Rubén Darío.”
Poesía
(Madrid) 34 & 35 (1991).

———.
La vida de Rubén Darío escrita por él mismo.
Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991.

———.
Azul . . . Cantos de vida y esperanza.
Ed. and intro. by José María Martínez. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995.

———. Cuentos.
Ed. by José María Martínez Domingo. Madrid: Cátedra, 1997.

———. Poesía erótica.
Ed. by Alberto Acereda. Madrid: Hiperión, 1997.

———. Epistolario selecto
. Ed. by Pablo Zegers and Thomas Harris, prólogo by Jorge Eduardo Arellano. Santiago, Chile: LOM Ediciones, 1999.

———.
“Rubén Darío y Nicaragua (Antología).”
El Pez y la Serpiente
33 (enero-febrero 2000).

—. Y una sed de ilusiones infinita.
Ed. by Alberto Acereda. Barcelona: Lumen, 2000.

———. Cartas desconocidas de Rubén Darío, 1882-1916.
Ed. by José Jirón Terán, Julio Valle-Castillo, and Jorge Eduardo Arellano. Managua: Academia Nicaragüense de la Lengua, 2000.

———. Selected Poems of Rubén Darío: A Bilingual Anthology.
Ed., trans. and with an intro. by Alberto Acereda and Will Derusha. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001.

———. Songs of Life and Hope / Cantos de vida y esperanza.
Ed. and trans. Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Darío, Rubén and César Vallejo.
Heraldos del nuevo mundo.
Ed. by Álvaro Urtecho and Ricardo González Vigil. Managua: Banco Central de Nicaragua and Embajada del Perú en Nicaragua, 1999.

Ellis, Keith.
Critical Approaches to Rubén Darío.
Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974.

Fernández, Jesse.
El poema en prosa en Hispanoamérica: Del modernismo a la vanguardia: estudio crítico y antología.
Madrid: Hiperión, 1994.

Fernández, Teodosio.
Rubén Darío.
Madrid: Historia 16; Quorum, 1987.

Gibson, Ian.
Yo, Rubén Darío: Memorias póstumas de un rey de la poesía.
Madrid: Aguilar, 2002.

Henríquez Ureña, Max.
Breve historia del modernismo.
México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962.

LoDato, Rosemary C.
Beyond the Glitter: The Language of Gems in Modernista Writers Rubén Darío, Ramón del
Valle-Inclánand José Asunción Silva.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999.

Jrade, Cathy Login.
Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity: The Modernist Recourse to Esoteric Tradition.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.

Mejía Sánchez, Ernesto, ed.
Estudios sobre Rubén Darío.
México: Fondo de Cultural Económica, 1968.

Moser, Gerald M. and Hensley C. Woodbridge. “Colaboraciones rubendarianas en
El Cojo Ilustrado
de Caracas: ‘La Klepsidra’ y ‘La Guerra.’ ”
Boletín Nicaragüense de Bibliografía y Documentación
104 ( julio-septiembre 1999):13-14.

Paz, Octavio. “El caracol y la sirena: Rubén Darío.” In
Cuadrivio: Darío, López Velarde, Pessoa, Cernuda.
México: J. Mortiz, 1965.

———. The Siren & the Seashell, and Other Essays on Poets and Poetry.
Trans. by Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.

Rama, Ángel.
Rubén Darío y el modernismo.
Caracas: Alfadil Ediciones, 1985.

Rodó, José Enrique.
Obras completas.
Ed. by Emir Rodríguez Monegal. Madrid: Aguilar, 1967.