Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (2 page)

Introduction

“In truth, I live on poetry. I am naught but a man of art.” Thus Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan
homme de lettres
and indisputable leader of the
Modernista
movement that swept Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, characterized himself. “I am good for nothing else,” he went on. “I believe in God, and I am attracted to mystery. I am befuddled by daydreams and death; I have read many philosophers yet I know not a word of philosophy. I do espouse a certain Epicureanism, of my own sort: let the soul and body enjoy as much as possible on earth, and do everything possible to continue that enjoyment in the next life. Which is to say,
je vois la vie en rose
.”

At once visionary and agent provocateur, Darío witnessed the arrival of modernity in every aspect of life on this side of the Atlantic: from education to religion, from politics and the arts to science and technology. He wondered: What makes the Spanish language used in the Americas different from the language of the Iberian Peninsula? To what extent are these nascent nations—whose drive toward independence, in geographic terms, began in Mexico in 1810 and spread throughout the hemisphere—really autonomous, really independent of their “motherland”? From what cultural well ought artists and intellectuals in the Americas drink? What set of symbols and motifs might artists and poets call their own? Of course, the questioning was the result of Darío’s discomfort with his surroundings, and it was not free of irony. “I detest the life and times it is my fate to live in,” he declared. Darío was what we might today call “conflicted”; he was constantly pulled in contrary directions. While he felt himself a man of the Americas, at heart he was a cosmopolitan who looked to Europe as his prime source of inspiration, hoping to redeem himself and his people from the morose Spanish culture, which for Latin America had been the only connection to the outside world, but which had fallen into an embarrassing mediocrity. A man of deep Catholic faith, he understood poetry much in the way the Romantics did: as a bridge toward nature and the spiritual world. In searching for motifs to alleviate his sense of loss, he embraced the worldly and very “contemporary” French Symbolists—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine in particular—but he also felt the allure of the pre-Columbian past. “If there is any poetry in our America,” Darío suggested, “it is in the old things; in Palenque and Utatlán, in the Indian of legend and the fine and sensual Inca, and in the great Moctezuma on his golden throne.”

When approached
sub specie aeternitatis,
the poetry of Latin America appears to be defined by a cyclical battle of opposites: on one side are the Europeanized voices of the so-called aesthetes, whose poetry is disconnected from the social conditions from which it springs; on the other are the practitioners of an
engagé
art, who believe that the word has the power to change the world. Of course this tension, in some shape or form, lives at the heart of every poet. In Darío’s case, it manifested itself more vividly than in anyone before him in the region, and the way he responded to it left a deep and lasting mark, to the point that one is able to declare, without fear of error, that the overall poetic tradition in the Spanish language on this side of the Atlantic is perfectly divisible into two halves: before and after Darío.

 

If the contribution of a single poet could be measured quantitatively, by the number of astonishing poems that have become an essential feature of a culture, then it is arguable that Darío stands as the most important poet ever to write in Latin America. From “Venus” to “Autumn Poem” and “Swans,” from “Poets! Towers of God!” to “To Columbus” and “To Roosevelt,” Darío achieves a pitch so faultless, a melodious style so controlled and authoritative, and a mannered tone, filled with Gallicisms, so influential not only to his successors but his contemporaries as well, as to make the reader believe that these pieces are integral to the universal order of Spanish-language letters. All artists dream of achieving perfection, but only a few might be said to succeed in their quest. Darío, in a handful of his compositions, makes the cut.

The first piece of criticism on Darío’s work appeared in 1884, when he was twenty-one years old. Since then, he has been the subject of a veritable academic industry. Hundreds of book-length studies and thousands of monographs have been written by scholars on Darío. He has been a lightning rod for the
Modernista
movement that swept the intellectual world of Latin America as the nineteenth century came to a close. (It is no secret that most of these academic examinations tend to be innocuous, jingoistic, and altogether inundated by a hygienic theoretical jargon that specializes in killing the power of poetry. At times one feels that these exercises do little to explain his legacy.) Scholars have delved into the minutiae of his biography and his oeuvre, exploring every imaginable aspect of it from a myriad of perspectives, from the sociological to the political, from the philosophical to the semantic. Special emphasis has been placed on Darío’s links to figures in world literature, with detailed concentration on his borrowings from the French intellectual orbit.

Beyond university circles, however, Darío’s posterity is nothing if not contested, and often the assessment of Darío’s legacy is so passionate as to be belligerent. Throughout his life not only was he often attacked for being either too daring or too imitative of foreign models, but his poetic revolution was also misunderstood. For some critics, such as philologist Raimundo Lida, Darío was not only the most admirable of all the
Modernista
poets but also one of the great modern Latin-American poets. And in an obituary published in 1916, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the Dominican literary critic who delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1940-41, was the first to equate Darío with Spain’s two major Golden Age poets, Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora. Federico García Lorca, in a conversation with Pablo Neruda at the PEN Club in Buenos Aires in 1933, argued, lyrically, that Darío “gave us the murmur of the forest in an adjective, and as masterful as Fray Luis de Granada, he made zodiacal signs out of the lemon tree, the hoof of a stag, and mollusks filled with terror and infinity. He launched us on the sea with frigates and shadows in our eyes, and built an enormous promenade of gin over the grayest afternoon the sky has ever known, and greeted the southwest wind as a friend, all heart like a Romantic poet, and put his hand on the Corinthian capital of all epochs with a sad, ironic doubt.” Pablo Neruda responded: Darío’s “red name deserves to be remembered, along with his essential tendencies, his terrible heartaches, his incandescent uncertainties, his descent into the hospitals of hell, his ascent to the castles of fame, his attributes as a great poet, now and forever undeniable.” Neruda added: “Federico García Lorca, a Spaniard, and I, a Chilean, dedicate the honors bestowed on us today to that great shadow who sang more loftily than ourselves, and who saluted, in a new voice, the Argentine soil that we now tread.”

But for others less diplomatic (and more racist, perhaps) in their judgment, such as Oxford don C. M. Bowra, Darío was a disappointing poet. Bowra compared the Nicaraguan unfavorably to W. B. Yeats, believing that Darío suffered from “his untutored simplicity and his complete lack of irony.” Bowra added: “We must 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 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: