Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) Read Free Page B

he discovered in a closet the first books he would read; among them were the Bible, Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, works by Cicero and Madame de Staël, and a volume of Golden Age Spanish comedies. He attended public school but also studied at the Iglesia de la Recolección in León under the tutelage of the Jesuits—who had been expelled from Guatemala. It was also in those early years that he began to write poetry; as he put it, “I would never commit a single error in rhythm.” Shortly after, Darío, at eleven, was writing epitaphs in verse on commission. His first poems were actually published in periodicals when he was thirteen years old; the newly formed newspaper El Termómetro featured a number of them. By the way, it is also said, implausibly, that before he reached twenty years of age Darío knew the entire Diccionario de la Real Academia Española by heart.
    In 1884, at seventeen, several important events took place in Darío’s life. At this time he was working as a presidential staff member under the regime of Adán Cárdenas, as well as in the National Library. The first life-changing event was Darío’s appointment to what would be the first of several diplomatic posts. The other was the start of his contributions to the Argentine daily La Nación, a professional relationship that would last until Darío’s death. And of course Darío’s connection to the library would also prove to be invaluable. Throughout his life, he surrounded himself with books. The act of reading is ubiquitous in him: it appears in his poems, as book-reviewing in his journalism, and as a leitmotif in his prose; he even has a volume called The Story of My Books .
    It was also at this period that Darío married for the first time, in a ceremony that took place in Nicaragua. His wife was Rafaela Contreras Cañas. She would be the first of three wives, with whom he would have four children, two of them dying in infancy. His first trip out of Nicaragua took him to Chile in 1886. In Chile, Darío found an atmosphere conducive to his revolutionary aesthetics, and in fact it was here that he made his debut as a poet in book form, with Abrojos in 1887. But it was Azul . . . ( Azure ), a tiny volume published by Imprenta y Litografía Excelsior in Valparaíso—a thriving Chilean city of a hundred thousand citizens at the time—that not only remained one of Darío’s all-time personal favorites but almost overnight made him famous in the Spanish-speaking world and turned him into the consummate leader of the Modernistas . The volume, combining poetry and prose, vies with Borges’s Ficciones as the single most influential book-length publication ever to appear in Latin America. ( One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, is next in importance.) Reaction to the book was mixed, but on balance gratifying. “I was greeted with incomprehension, astonishment, and censure from the professors, but cordial applause from my companions,” Darío wrote. What made the volume so terribly important? “My success—it would be absurd not to confess it—has been due to novelty.” He went on to explain:
     
    The origin of the novelty was my recent encounter with the French authors of the Parnassus, for at the time the Symbolist struggle was just beginning in France and so was not known abroad, much less in our Americas. . . . Accustomed as I was to the eternal cliché of the Spanish Siglo de Oro and Spain’s indecisive modern poetry, I found in those French writers a mine of literary gold that was there to be explored, and exploited: I applied their way of employing adjectives, certain syntactical habits, a verbal aristocracy, to my Spanish. The rest was given by the character of Spanish itself, and the talent of yours truly. And I, who know Baralt’s Dictionary of Gallicisms by heart, realized that not just a well-chosen Gallicism but also certain particularities from other languages might be extremely useful, might even be of