Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (20 page)

 

There’s no reason to abhor or ignore
the empress and the queen of Nothingness—
she wove the cloth of life in which we dress,
and in her own cup of dreams, she will pour
an anti-nepenthe—she won’t forget!

Jesús, incomparable perdonador de injurias,
óyeme; Sembrador de trigo, dame el tierno
pan de tus hostias; dame, contra el sañudo infierno,
una gracia lustral de iras y lujurias.

 

Dime que este espantoso horror de la agonía
que me obsede, es no más de mi culpa nefanda,
que al morir hallaré la luz de un nuevo día
y que entonces oiré mi “¡Levántate y anda!”

[p 1905]

Jesus, forgiver of trespass beyond compare,
hear me; sower of wheat, please give me the gentle
bread of your hosts; give me, against the wrath of hell,
a blessing that will cleanse rage, lust, despair.

 

Tell me that these grim thoughts of pain and agony
that plague my mind are just my own guilt-laden fears,
and when I die I’ll find the light of a new day,
and that the words, “Stand up and walk!” will reach my ears.

La dulzura del ángelus matinal y divino
que diluyen ingenuas campanas provinciales,
en un aire inocente a fuerza de rosales,
de plegaria, de ensueño de virgen y de trino
de ruiseñor, opuesto todo al rudo destino
que no cree en Dios . . . El áureo ovillo vespertino
que la tarde devana tras opacos cristales
por tejer la inconsútil tela de nuestros males

 

todos hechos de carne y aromados de vino . . .
Y esta atroz amargura de no gustar de nada,
de no saber adónde dirigir nuestra prora

 

mientras el pobre esquife en la noche cerrada
va en las hostiles olas huérfano de la aurora . . .
(¡Oh, suaves campanas entre la madrugada!)

[1905]

The sweet morning Angelus, its divinity
diffused by the chiming of bells from the province,
the roses that exhale an air of innocence,
the dreams of the virgin, and the sweet litany

 

of nightingales: all oppose the rough destiny
of not believing in God . . . Twilight is ready
to spin a ball of gold thread behind dark windows,
to start weaving our iniquities’ seamless clothes,

 

vices redolent of wine and carnality.
The loathsome bitterness of not liking a thing,
of having no idea where to steer our prow

 

as the poor skiff moves through the stormy night, losing
its way among hostile waves like an orphan now . . .
Oh, gentle bells, which break the day with their tolling.

 

 

Dichoso el árbol que es apenas sensitivo,
y más la piedra dura porque esa ya no siente,
pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo,
ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente.

 

Ser, y no saber nada, y ser sin rumbo cierto,
y el temor de haber sido y un futuro terror . . .
Y el espanto seguro de estar mañana muerto,
y sufrir por la vida y por la sombra y por

 

lo que no conocemos y apenas sospechamos,
y la carne que tienta con sus frescos racimos,
y la tumba que aguarda con sus fúnebres ramos,
¡y no saber adónde vamos,
ni de dónde venimos! . . .

[p 1905]

 

 

Trees are lucky because they barely sense a thing.
Stones, as well, because they’re hard, beyond all feeling.
No pain’s greater than the pain of being aware.
Human consciousness produces the worst despair.

 

To be, yet know nothing with no clear way to go,
the fear of having been, a future terror, too,
the unerring dread of being dead tomorrow,
and suffering through life and through shadows and through

 

the unknown and what one cannot anticipate,
the temptation of flesh, the fresh fruit still to come,
our tombs and the memorial laurels that await,
not knowing where we’re going
or even where we’re from!

STORIES AND FABLES

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

 

 

Darío tells his readers in “The Story of His Books:
Azure
. . .” that his masters in the art of writing were French; he read Théophile Gautier, the Flaubert of
The Temptation of St. Anthony,
Catulle Mendès (both in the original and translated into Spanish), Paul de Saint-Victor, and from them he got an instantly dazzling conception of style. His incorporation of the Gallic adjective, Gallic syntactical habits, and, undeniably, a certain Gallic attitude—arch and knowing and slightly world-weary and most decidedly “decadent”—was indeed theretofore unknown in Spanish, and so one can make the argument that Rubén Darío was as important a “translator” for Spanish culture as the great German translators and translation theorists were to German culture in the nineteenth century, opening the closed land and literature to new currents of thought and imagination and poetics and aesthetics, and to new possibilities in the language. And from that, as though as an expression of the gratitude of Spanish youth, fame came almost overnight to the young poet. Schools of poets grew up around his poetry and stories, and his repertory of words and images and meters and “influences” was appropriated ad nauseam by writers both younger
and
older. And Spanish culture was forever changed, just as translations, cultural cross-pollinations, have made happen for thousands of years, as one culture has embraced another culture’s graces.

So how does one translate into English a writer who has himself “translated” French literature of the late nineteenth century into Spanish, with all those entanglements of European-American-Latin American culture and literature, all those borrowings and emulations and apprenticeships? First of all, one starts by presuming that the themes and images and structures pretty much take care of themselves, and that what one has to labor to achieve is a particular
style.
Then one begins by believing Neruda, who says that Rubén Darío created the (Spanish) language that people spoke in the early part of the twentieth century. That would argue for a relatively “modern” syntax. On the other hand, Darío’s images and themes and treatments and attitudes are clearly those of his time, not ours, and not much in fashion today—and we recognize them (speaking now of the prose, which is my purview here) in Poe and Wilde and Huysmans and others: authors of an earlier day, with a very particular manner of expression.

These are the considerations that led to my choice of a translation strategy, or mode: Just as in Spanish Darío reminds one of the 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 familiar with through Poe, Wilde, and Huysmans.

Let me mention two particular decisions that came to seem inevitable over the course of my translation: First, that wherever Darío used the word
azul,
I would say not “blue,” which is the standard and baseline translation for the word, but rather “azure.”
Azul
meant so much to Darío—his first volume of poems, the poems that made him famous, bore that name, and it signified blue skies and the ocean and hope and spring, but also, in Spanish, is associated with “fairy tales”
(cuentos azules)
and “knights in shining armor” (
príncipes azules;
also translated as “Prince Charming”)—the world of daydreams, and of dreams-that-we-wish-would-come-true, as the song in Disney’s
Cinderella
has it. Darío dreamed his entire life—dreamed against a reality he felt had not dealt him the lot he merited; dreaming represented escape from the quotidian world and into the empyrean. The word
azul,
then, needed to be something more than just “blue,” with its associations of feeling blue, singing the blues, and so on. “Azure” seemed just right.

The second decision was to use French borrowings throughout. There is simply no question that Darío incorporated an unprecedented number of gallicisms into the rather dour and colorless (“insipid,” Neruda says) Spanish of his day; he thought, often, in a kind of French-Spanish patois. I decided that the English used to represent him should indicate that hybridity, and so my translations are full—I hope not obtrusively full—of French phrases and other foreign words and expressions, un-English’d. It was a way, too, of indicating Darío’s remarkable cosmopolitanism—underscoring the almost incredible range of cultural references in his stories and essays.

Lost in translation:
This phrase grates on the ear, patience, and professional and creative pride of literary translators everywhere. The general public and many reviewers of translations appear not to recognize that the phrase is a truncation: Robert Frost is famously but probably apocryphally quoted as saying (with a gleam in his eye), “Poetry is what’s lost in translation.” When one hears it put that way, as a quip-cum-definition of poetry (and an exceptionally clever way of dodging the question “How would you define poetry, Mr. Frost?”), some of the sting of the aphorism is assuaged. But when a translator is asked by an interviewer straight out, on radio, and without warning, what his translation has lost (as though he wouldn’t put back whatever it was if he knew, and could!), he has to come up with a response that is not too curt, not too thin-skinned. And so what I once not at all famously replied (frostily dodging the question) was not that my translation had lost anything, but that with time, the shock of the new caused by a great writer’s innovations to the language had been lost to readers of today.

Rubén Darío will probably not seem new or shocking, and certainly not contemporary to us, in my translations here, just as Rubén Darío no longer seems new or shocking, or contemporary, either, in Spanish. He lies firmly in the past. And yet he exerts a timeless fascination, as Poe does, and Wilde, and Huysmans, who have unquestionably influenced generation upon generation of writers and who are still read today. They are “classics.” And so, even when the shock of the new has become dulled, what we know when we read these innovator-classics is that they created new ways of writing, opened new windows of the imagination to and for their contemporaries and those who followed. Rubén Darío’s charms are manifold and manifest, and we hope that this volume may allow them to be appreciated as they should be, for the first time in English in such abundance and breadth.

—ANDREW HURLEY

On Poetry and the Poet

THE BOURGEOIS KING

 

 

 

Friend! The sky is dark, the wind is cold, the day is sad. What say you to a cheering tale, to dispel the gray mists of melancholy? . . . A tale such as this one, say:

 

Once, in a grand and brilliant city there was a powerful king who had rich, capricious apparel, naked slave-girls both black-skinned and white, long-maned steeds, bright new weapons, lean swift greyhounds, and huntsmen with brass horns, who filled the air with fanfares. Was this king a poet? No, my friend, he was the Bourgeois King.

This sovereign was very fond of the arts, and with great largesse he would favor his musicians, his makers of dithyrambs, his painters, sculptors, and apothecaries, his barbers and fencing masters.

When he went out into the leafy forest, to hunt the roe or bring to earth the bloody, wounded boar, he would bid his professors of rhetoric to improvise allusive songs. His servants would fill glasses with that golden wine that bubbles in the cup, and women would clap their hands and perform elegant, rhythmic dances. He was a Sun King, in his Babylon filled with music, laughter, and the sounds of revelry. When he wearied of the tumult of the city, he would go out hunting, and the woods would ring with the noise of his retinue. The sound would frighten the birds from their nests, and the shouts and calls would echo in the hidden depths of caves. Dogs of elastic gait would race through the undergrowth, parting it as they went, and hunters would strain forward, leaning over the long necks of their horses, their faces flushed, their hair tousled, their purple mantles rippling out behind them as they pursued their prey.

 

The king had a magnificent palace, in which he had amassed rich treasures and marvelous
objets d’art.
A path that wound through fields of fragrant lilacs and past broad pools of water led to this palace, and long-necked swans bade visitors welcome even before the tall-standing footmen and palace pages. At the entrance was a stairway lined with alabaster and smaragdite columns and flanked with marble lions, like those of the throne of Solomon. The palace breathed Refinement. In addition to the swans, the king, a lover of harmony, of cooing, of twittering and chirping, had a vast aviary, and to soothe his spirit he would go out to sit on a nearby bench, where he would read novels by M. Ohnet, or lovely books of grammar or pretty criticism. For the king was, indeed, a puissant defender of scholarly correctness in writing, and of absolute neatness in the arts. His sublime soul loved polish, and good spelling.

 

Japonaiserie! Chinoiserie!
For the luxury of it, period. Well might his riches afford a salon worthy of the good taste of a Goncourt, the millions of a Croesus: bronze chimeras with open jaws and coiled tails, in fantastic, wondrous groupings; lacquers from Kyoto with inlaid leaves and branches of a monstrous flora, animals of an unknown fauna; butterflies with rare wings upon the walls; many-colored fish and gamecocks; masks with hellish grimaces and eyes that seemed alive; pikes and halberds with ancient blades, their handles emblazoned with dragons devouring lotus flowers; in vessels of porcelain as thin as eggshell, tunics of yellow silk, as though spun from spider webs, with embroidery of red cranes and green rice plants; and vases of great antiquity, with designs of Tartar warriors in kidney-length coats of shaggy fur, bearing tensed bows and quivers of sharp arrows.