Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) Read Free Page A

generation, and in doing so left us an early thought-provoking analysis of Darío’s poetry. Angel Rama, Pedro Salinas, and Max Henríquez Ureña (Pedro’s brother) produced valuable commentaries. There is also a fine essay by Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize winner who in more ways than one has been the inheritor of Darío’s mantle: the poet as cultural commentator. In 1964, while in New Delhi on diplomatic service, Paz published a piece called “The Siren and the Seashell” (included in his book Cuadrivio ), in which he convincingly dissects Darío’s aesthetic and ideological revolution. It strikes me as one of the most convincing appraisals of Darío, his work, and his position in Latin American culture. It includes this argument, which helps us place the Nicaraguan in context:
     
    Darío was not only the richest and most ample of the Modernist poets: he was also one of our great modern poets. He was the beginning. At times he makes one think of Poe; at other times, of Whitman. Of the first, in that portion of his work in which he scorns the world of the Americas and is preoccupied solely by an otherwordly music; of the second, in that portion in which he expresses his vitalist affirmation, his pantheism, and his belief that he was, in his own right, the bard of Latin America as Whitman was of Anglo-America. In contrast to Poe, Darío did not enclose himself within his own spiritual adventure; neither did he have Whitman’s ingenuous faith in progress and brotherhood. More than to the two great North Americans, he could be compared to Hugo: eloquence, abundance, and that continuous surprise, that unending flow, of rhyme. Like the French poet’s, his inspiration was that of the cyclopean sculpture; his stanzas are blocks of animated matter, veined with sudden delicacies: the striation of lighting on the stone. And the rhythm, the continuous swing that makes the language our enormous aquatic mass. Darío was less excessive and prophetic; he was also less valiant: he was not a rebel and he did not profess a horror of both miniaturism and titanism. More nervous, more anguished, he oscillated between contradictory impulses: one could say that he was a Hugo attacked by “decadent” ills. Despite the fact that he loved and imitated Verlaine above all (and above all others), his best poems have little resemblance to those of his model. He had superabundant health and energy; his sun was stronger, his wine more generous. Verlaine was a provincial Parisian; Darío a Central American globetrotter. His poetry is virile: skeleton, heart, sex.
     
    Rubén Darío was born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento on January 18, 1867, in Metapa, a small town in what is now the municipality of Matagapa in Nicaragua. (It was eventually renamed Ciudad Darío.) His pen name, like that of Neruda (born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto), was adopted later: it combines his second forename and the second last name of his father, Manuel García Darío. (His mother was Rosa Sarmiento Alemán.) He was baptized a Christian. His parents separated soon after his birth. His mother took him to Honduras, but eventually returned to Nicaragua, where Darío was raised in León.
    In his autobiography, published in 1915 and known in Spanish as La vida de Rubén Darío escrita por él mismo (The Life of Rubén Darío, Written by Himself), a volume which, as critics have pointed out, is filled with deliberate omissions as well as unintended errors, Darío reflected on the colonial landscape that surrounded him as a child. León, he said, was filled with cupolas, stone-paved streets, and fortresses. There were legends of decapitated priests on horses running wild; relatives would tell him ghost stories. Clearly, these stories and this setting instilled in him a sense of mystery and even religious devotion.
    Anecdotes about Darío’s precociousness abound. He himself stated that he learned to read at the age of three. And in his autobiography he tells us that at ten