Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (8 page)

Salinas, Pedro.
La poesía de Rubén Darío: Ensayo sobre el tema y los temas del poeta.
Buenos Aires: Losada, 1948.

Schulman, Iván A.
Nuevos asedios al modernismo.
Madrid: Taurus, 1987.

Schulman, Iván A. and Manuel Pedro González.
Martí, Darío y el modernismo.
Madrid: Gredos, 1969.

Skyrme, Raymond.
Rubén Darío and the Pythagorean Tradition.
Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1975.

Torres, Edelberto.
La dramática vida de Rubén Darío.
Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1966.

Valle-Castillo, Julio. “Un manuscrito y dos poemas inéditos de Rubén Darío.”
Nuevo Amanecer Cultural
(15 de enero de 2000):1-3.

Whisnant, David.
Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Woodbridge, Hensley C.
Bibliografía selectiva clasificada y anotada.
León: UNAN, 1975.

———. Rubén Darío: A Selective Classified and Annotated Bibliography.
Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1975.

———. Bibliografía selectiva clasificada y anotada
(
suplemento para los años 1974-76).
León: UNAN, 1977.

———. Bibliografía activa de Rubén Darío (1883-1980): una bibliografía selectiva clasificada y anotada (suplemento II
para los años 1975-78).
Managua: Biblioteca Nacional Rubén Darío, Ministerio de Cultura, 1981.

Ycaza Tigerino, Julio and Eduardo Zepeda-Henríquez.
Estudio de la poética de Rubén Darío.
Managua: Comisión Nacional del Centenario Rubén Darío, 1867-1967, 1967.

Zavala, Iris.
M. Rubén Darío bajo el signo del cisne.
Río Piedras, P.R.: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1989.

A Note on the Text

No critical edition of Rubén Darío’s complete works is available. The most authoritative sources in Spanish are the four-volume
Obras completas
(Afrodisio Aguado, 1950), edited by M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez;
Poesías completas
(Aguilar, 1961), edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, famous also for his work on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and San Juan de la Cruz;
Poesía
(Ayacucho, 1977), edited by Ernesto Mejía Sánchez; and
Azul . . . Cantos de vida y esperanza
(Cátedra, 1995), edited by José María Martínez. The guiding rod in this Penguin Classics volume was the M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez edition. In translating the poetry, Greg Simon and Steven F. White used the three-volume anthology released by Biblioteca Corona, compiled by Darío himself, which suggests a thematic, rather than chronological, approach to his oeuvre:
Muy siglo xviii
(1914),
Muy antiguo y muy moderno
(1915), and
Y una sed de ilusiones infinita
(1916). Section 3 is based on the speculation of Pablo Antonio Cuadra and Eduardo Zepeda-Henríquez, who, in their anthology
Antología poética
(Hospicio, 1966), extend Darío’s own strategy in the Biblioteca Corona volumes by proposing an additional grouping of poems that might be entitled
Audaz, cosmopolita.
In translating the prose, Andrew Hurley used the M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez edition;
Cuentos completos
(Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950), edited by Ernesto Mejía Sánchez; as well as
Cuentos
(Cátedra, 1997), edited by José María Martínez. Finally, the sources for Darío’s correspondence as translated by Steven F. White are
Epistolario
(Biblioteca Rubén Darío, 1932), edited by Alberto Ghiraldo;
Cartas de Rubén Darío: Epistolario inédito del poeta con sus amigos
españoles
(Taurus, 1963), edited by Dictino Álvarez Hernández;
Epistolario selecto
(LOM Ediciones, 1999), edited by Pablo Zegers and Thomas Harris; and
Cartas desconocidas de Rubén Darío, 1882-1916
(Academia Nicaragüense de la Lengua, 2000), edited by José Jirón Terán, Julio Valle-Castillo, and Jorge Eduardo Arellano.

POEMS

TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

—
R. D.

 

 

Many commentators on the poetry of Rubén Darío correctly praise the Nicaraguan for introducing elements of syntactical freedom into Spanish prosody. Almost all of them go on to mention the other prosodic development that would become predominant with Darío’s peers, and the poets who followed them: free verse. But a translator of Darío soon discovers that most of his lines were composed to meet strict metrical standards, fortified by rhyme. That his alexandrines also contained the power to liberate late-nineteenth-century poetic thinking in Spanish was a testament to Darío’s aggressiveness as a poet. His work was modern in the sense that it was disruptive and disturbing. It juxtaposed the seeds of Darío’s native Catholicism and the Symbolist poetry he found himself surrounded by for most of his life, in his own words, “against a tempestuous pagan instinct . . . complicated by the psycho-physical need for thought-modifying stimulants, dangerous combustibles, suppressors of disturbing perspectives . . . which put at risk the cerebral machine and the vibrating tunic of nerves.” The tyranny of tin-pot dictators and a lack of money curtailed the life Darío wanted to live as a man. But almost miraculously, the tyranny of metrical composition liberated Darío as a poet. In verse, Darío was finally free to be himself.

He was obsessed by white things: swans, stars, shells, the caps of ocean waves, bulls, women, buildings, sand, wine, and fear. Yes, fear is white, white-hot, and Darío feared, most of all, that he would be forgotten. His answer: make it impossible to ignore or not memorize his work by carving it into metric stone. “Governments change,” Mallarmé wrote, “prosody remains ever intact.” Because his family was penurious, Darío was forced to make his living as an itinerant journalist and diplomat. But he filled his secret life, his life away from the official functions, women, and alcoholic binges, with horizontal columns of the next best thing to stone: words. “In truth,” he wrote, “I live on poetry. My dreams have a Solomonic magnificence. I love beauty, power, grace, money, luxury, kisses, and music . . .”

Most of this age-old wish list went unrequited during Darío’s lifetime, but it is undeniable that his writing shimmers with beauty and strains with verbal harmony and grace. “[E]ach word has a soul,” he tells us, and to understand this “lexical aristocracy,” to delve into the interior, ideal melody that words create when they are placed in conjunction with each other, Darío believed a poet must apply “a grounding in knowledge of the art to which one consecrated oneself, an indispensable erudition, and the necessary gift of good taste.” Yes, the soul of a word has its mysteries, those elements of usage, spelling, and language of origin, but it is also full of history. For the key to unlocking the power of the word-soul, Darío wrote that he “looked toward the past, toward ancient mythologies and splendid histories. . . .”

Darío became a hunter, imagining himself the twin of Nimrod, an ancient Persian king who founded Nineveh and Babylon, and who, after his descendants conquered Jerusalem, was identified by the Jews as an Antichrist. Darío, who was once jailed for antireligious sedition himself, sought to be one of the enchanted hunters who seek the forms in which words will find their resting places, where they will reveal the images in their souls. This movement of knowledge is literature, as Roberto Calasso defines it, “divine material that molds itself into epiphanies and enthrones itself in the mind. . . .” Literature is found at the primordial hunting grounds where humans can encounter the gods, gaze at them, even emulate and name them, at the risk of glory or death.

The glossary at the end of this volume supports and amplifies the translations from the immense poetic output of Rubén Darío. It contains a fraction of the names, places, and occasionally untranslatable words that fill the one thousand three hundred pages of his
Poesias completas.
While Darío’s vocabulary perfectly reflects the diversity of cultures and mythologies he touched upon in his extensive readings and travels, a reader will quickly notice that this vocabulary is dominated by the masculine gender, as is the list of names of the world’s leading Symbolist poets. (In fact, there are
no
women on that list.) Poets are warrior-poets, and the women they master or win for themselves during their trials of strength are most often represented as victims, seductresses, or breeding stock.

In the annals of poetry, such gender loyalty is hardly unique. Poets tend to make life choices based on what works best for their art. The Muse is unpredictable, and in our next translation project we might very well find a poet completely dedicated to another gender. Salomé’s, for example, who despite the seeming callousness of her attitude toward the health of the men around her, has inspired many famous admirers throughout history, both male and female, including an active cult still devoted to decapitation.

Those of us who live in a time in history when equality for women is rightfully ascendant (though by no means perfected) might wish for more enlightenment in the poetry we are reading and translating. But such hindsight, while politically correct, is insufferable. A selection of
Darío profundo
is simply a selection of modern poetry of the highest order, driven by loyalty to the same manic flood of words that impelled Darío from the age of three.

As Ilan Stavans stated it in the introduction to this anthology, the ordering principle of the section on poetry in this anthology is an approximation of Darío’s own strategy for representing his verse, in keeping with three ornate little volumes (from Madrid’s Biblioteca Corona) that appeared at the end of the poet’s life in 1914, 1915, and 1916. Darío chose a stanza from the
“Preludio”
to his landmark work,
Cantos de vida y esperanza,
to provide the titles for the only anthologies the poet organized himself:
Y muy siglo diez y ocho, Y muy antiguo y muy moderno,
and
Y una sed de ilusiones infinita.
No doubt it was a truncated project. Indeed, Nicaraguan Darío specialists Eduardo Zepeda-Henríquez and Pablo Antonio Cuadra believe that Darío may very well have intended to publish a fourth volume that might justifiably have been entitled
Audaz, cosmopolita,
a convincing speculation that has been incorporated into our selection. Darío’s audacious and cosmopolitan sensibility certainly warrants the inclusion here of poems such as “Tutecotzimí” (a celebration of the poet’s indigenous heritage that perturbed his racist contemporaries in Spain), “Black Dominga” (a doorway to the future
movimiento de la negritud
), “To Roosevelt” (the quintessential Latin American poem of finely honed political denunciation), and “The Great Cosmopolis” (a vision of New York City that resonates with Lorca’s subsequent treatment of this urban center in 1929-30).

Can Darío be found in the harmony of a hemistich, or is he in the caesura, which functions in his work as a kind of fulcrum of silence between one hemistich and another? Perhaps it ultimately became possible for us as translators to hear Darío moving with such certainty and grace across his deeply folded soundscape as we attempted to find compressed English equivalents to alexandrines and hendecasyllables. We relished the idea of these formal challenges, these Pythagorean proposals, as new doorways to the slightly dissonant harmonics of rhyme and slant rhyme in English. Often we found ourselves abandoning a fully rational approach to our work in favor of one that is more subjective since, in Douglas Robinson’s words, “humans translate truly, restoratively, only when they hear and become a responsive part of the translating of spirit.” In any event, translations are a kind of afterlife, a thick vine of the souls, perhaps, from which, as Walter Benjamin says, “the life of the originals attains in them . . . its ever renewed latest and most abundant flowering.”

Steven F. White gratefully acknowledges the ongoing guidance of Jorge Eduardo Arellano, Julio Valle-Castillo, and Don José Jirón Terán (1916-2004). He also thanks
Banisteriopsis caapi
and
Psychotria viridis
for their collective insights into Rubén’s eternal harmonies.

—Greg Simon and Steven F. White

 

 

Yo soy aquel que ayer no más decía
el verso azul y la canción profana,
en cuya noche un ruiseñor había
que era alondra de luz por la mañana.

 

El dueño fui de mi jardín de sueño,
lleno de rosas y de cisnes vagos;
el dueño de las tórtolas, el dueño
de góndolas y liras en los lagos;

 

y muy siglo diez y ocho y muy antiguo
y muy moderno; audaz, cosmopolita;
con Hugo fuerte y con Verlaine ambiguo,
y una sed de ilusiones infinita.

 

La virtud está en ser tranquilo y fuerte;
con el fuego interior todo se abrasa;
se triunfa del rencor y de la muerte. . . .

[1904]

 

 

Why, only yesterday I was reciting
poems with azure lines and songs that were profane.
And there was a nightingale in my writing
that became a radiant lark when morning came.

 

I was the master of my garden of dream
filled with roses and the rippling a swan makes,
master of turtledoves and all that’s serene—
music of harps and gondolas on lakes.

 

And those that come from the eighteenth century;
some both ancient and modern; some audacious,
cosmopolitan; Hugo, yes!, Verlaine, maybe;
and a thirst for illusive hope that’s endless.

Virtue consists of being strong and tranquil;
your inner fire will turn anything to ash
and lift you above anger and death as well.

I.

And Those That Come from the Eighteenth Century