Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) Read Free

remember that he was a stranger from an underdeveloped land, that he had Indian blood in his veins and lacked the complexity and the sophistication which would belong to a European of his gifts and tastes.” Luis Cernuda and Gastón Baquero, poets from Spain and Cuba respectively, saw Darío as either unoriginal or unworthy of his Latin-American origins, which, Baquero claimed, Darío seemed to reject in one poem after another. Baquero, we should note, changed his mind later in life; he dedicated one of his last books, Memorial de un testigo (A Witness’s Memorial, 1966), to Darío. Is this proof of the kind of love/hate relationship that a solid number of Latin American poets have with the Nicaraguan? Indeed, since the twenties it has become a sport among young aesthetes to attack Darío in manifestos that proclaim a rupture, a rejection of his legacy, only to prove themselves hijos de Rubén, followers of the poet, in the years that follow.
    The fact that youngsters throw stones at Darío proves that he has been, even for his opponents, a beloved enemy, an unmistakable and omnipresent landmark. We find this attitude in Pablo Antonio Cuadra and José Coronel Urtecho in Nicaragua itself, as well as in Spain and elsewhere in Latin America, as it was held by Vallejo, Neruda, Lorca, and a host of other, less gifted, poets. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, another Modernista, once said, apropos of one of the Nicaraguan’s favorite animal motifs, the swan, that it was the duty of every follower of Darío to “torcerle el cuello al cisne,” to wring the bird’s neck. Yet the work his accusers ended up producing has been remarkably Dariano. In any case, Cernuda and Baquero are part of the cadre of followers who have used the terms “decadent” and “melancholic” to attack the Nicaraguan poet. For them, the school of Rubenistas is about using symbols and meters that are foreign to the western shores of the Atlantic.
    But what, in a culture such as ours, in which cross-fertilization is a sine qua non and the concept of purity in art is as elusive as it is artificial, can “foreignness” really mean? Latin-American literature in general, and poetry above all (not the poetry produced by pre-Columbian poets, of course, Nahuas such as Nezahualcoyotl and Axayacatl, but surely that which is the by-product of the colonial period and most crucially that which has been composed from Darío’s generation onward), is really the result of a constant bombardment of outside influences. Foreign models first from Europe (Spain, France, Italy) and then from the United States, represented in figures such as Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman, have exercised enormous power. Darío was neither bashful nor deceitful about these models. And his temperamental attraction to melancholy no doubt makes him a “typical” fin-de-siècle artist. As for his Decadence, it was an imitation of French Symbolism and Parnassianism, as well as of the remnants of the Romantic Movement that had swept Germany, Italy, and England, and that had not a few late repercussions in the United States. For a Nicaraguan to dream of a poetry firmly established in the motto l’art pour l’art might be seen, in and of itself, as an anachronism. But cannot poets of these lands also share in the feast of Western Civilization? Why should a Central American Decadent be less worthy than, say, his North American counterpart, or for that matter, Gautier himself?
    Of Darío’s Rezeptionsgeshichte, there are a number of essays worth reading for their clear and informed judgment. These include an illustrious exegetical essay by the Uruguayan critic José Enrique Rodó, author of the significant mediation Ariel, in which the Anglo and Hispanic sensibilities are for the first time contrasted in sharp philosophical terms. Rodó championed the Modernista aesthetic through lucid literary explorations. He focused on Darío as a stepping-stone for his