Product Description

Born in Nicaragua, Rubén Darío is known as the consummate leader of the Modernista movement, an esthetic trend that swept the Americas from Mexico to Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. Seeking a language and a style that would distinguish the newly emergent nations from the old imperial power of Spain, Darío’s writing offered a refreshingly new vision of the world—an artistic sensibility at once cosmopolitan and connected to the rhythms of nature. The first part of this collection presents Darío’s most significant poems in a bilingual format and organized thematically in the way Darío himself envisioned them. The second part is devoted to Darío’s prose, including short stories, fables, profiles, travel writing, reportage, opinion pieces, and letters. A sweeping biographical introduction by distinguished critic Ilan Stavans places Darío in historical and artistic context, not only in Latin America but in world literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #798802 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

From The Washington Post
Next to Borges, the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario (1867-1916) is perhaps Latin America's most cosmopolitan writer. But unlike Borges, Dario -- a cosmopolite who doesn't travel well -- remains mostly unknown outside the Spanish-reading world. Although his lack of success in translation is usually blamed on the difficulty of recasting his ornate, highly stylized verse, it surely has as much to do with the ambiguous nature of his achievement. Universally credited (a credit that he basked in) with liberating Spanish-language poetry from the declamatory Romanticism of his immediate predecessors, Dario became famous for innovations that, in the broader context of late 19th-century European and American literature, were no innovations at all. When placed next to that of Mallarme or Verlaine, whom he readily acknowledged as models, Dario's poetry shares the luster but lacks the depth. When placed next to that of Hugo or Whitman, whom he also admired, his metrical experiments seem little more than salon exercises.

And yet Dario's influence on Hispanic literature has been enormous. There is hardly a modern Spanish or Spanish American poet -- from the Spaniard Juan Ramon Jimenez to the Latin Americans Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz -- who is not indebted to him, if not for details of phrasing or form, then certainly for the desire to lift Spanish poetic diction from the rut into which it had fallen after the "Golden Age" of great baroque poets such as Gongora and Quevedo. But the most influential poetry is not necessarily the most durable (indeed, the opposite is often the case); and although it may be heresy to say this, it is difficult to read some of Dario's best-known poems today without wondering what all the fuss has been about. Whatever their historical importance and technical finesse, compositions like "Sonatina," about a medieval princess who pines for her faraway prince, or "It was a soft air. . . ," about the wicked and beautiful Marquise Eulalia, a femme now fatale only to herself, appeal to us principally as curiosities, the literary equivalents of the heirlooms one sees every week on "The Antiques Road Show." When Dario, in another much-quoted poem, describes the Poet as a "man-mountain chained to a lily," one assents to the thought (perhaps) but winces at the metaphor.

Ironically, Dario is relevant today less for the rococo glitter of the poems that made him a celebrity -- contained in two early books, Azul (Blue, 1888) and Prosas profanas (Profane Hymns, 1896) -- than for the unvarnished subject matter of his later work. Published exactly 100 years ago, his bracing diatribe against Teddy Roosevelt -- Hercules in riding boots -- serves up the mixture of awe, fear and envy that has defined the attitude of many Latin Americans toward the Colossus to the north. Less prophetic, but equally powerful, are the poems and articles calling for pan-Hispanic solidarity in the wake of Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American War.

The aging Dario, who had once bragged that Spain was his wife but France his mistress, became a propagandist for what he called "fecund Hispania," composing patriotic odes and extolling "Our Lord Don Quijote." In the prologue to one of his last books of poetry, El canto errante (The Errant Song; 1907), he states that no philosophical imports from England, France or Germany can match the wisdom stored in old Spanish folios.

Dario's turnabout reflects the contradictions in his own life. Born in a small town in Nicaragua and raised by a great aunt after the separation of his parents, the precocious Dario began his literary career when he was 10 or 11 years old by writing verse epitaphs upon request. Leaving Nicaragua when he was barely 20, he wandered throughout Europe and Latin America for the rest of his life, eking out a living by taking occasional diplomatic posts and writing countless articles for newspapers. Declaring in the manifesto that opens Prosas profanas that he hated the world into which he had been born -- including his "drops" of Indian blood -- Dario nevertheless was unable to turn his back on that world without guilt and melancholy. In his last years, the same man who had filled his books with nymphs and satyrs affirmed that Leon, the Nicaraguan city where he was raised and where he died, was his Rome and his Athens. It was a long road back home.

Although there have been other recent attempts to make Dario available in English, this new volume is the most ambitious and representative. Especially welcome is the inclusion of generous selections from his fiction and nonfiction, by far the largest segment of his output, yet the least appreciated. As one would expect, the poetry does not fare as well as the prose, though it should have fared better than it does. The inaccuracy of some of Greg Simon's and Steven White's verse translations, compounded by the decision to render Dario in rhymed colloquial English, results in poems that are not poetry and, worse, not Dario. In "Nocturne," a poem in which he speaks of expressing his anguish, this translation has him erasing it; in "To Columbus," when he inveighs against the "writing rabble," the translation, in a bizarre misreading, turns him against the "works of women."

By contrast, Andrew Hurley's versions of Dario's stories and essays are superb, and Ilan Stavans's introduction is lively and informative, in spite of a couple of surprising gaffes (the author of the notorious anti-Dario sonnet that calls for the strangling of the iconic swans was Enrique Gonzalez Martinez, not Manuel Gutierrez Najera).

In "Far Away," a brief lyric written while he was living in Europe, Dario evokes an ox that he remembers from his childhood. Panting under the fiery Nicaraguan sun, the "heavy-footed ox" has little in common with the exotic fauna -- swans, falcons, peacocks, dragons -- of better-known poems and fables. But this ox, he says, is his life. There is not a truer or more exquisite line in all of Dario's work.

Reviewed by Gustavo Perez-Firmat
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author
Rubén Darío (1867–1916) gained prominence in Azul..., the publication of which sparked the Modernista movement in the Spanish-speaking Americas.

Andrew Hurley is a translator of numerous works of literature, criticism, history, and memoir. He is professor emeritus at the University of Puerto Rico.

Greg Simon is the translator or cotranslator of numerous works by such authors as Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda.

Stephen F. White has edited and translated anthologies of contemporary poetry from Latin America.

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the author or editor of numerous books.

Customer Reviews

A Darío for Our Time
The poems, prose, and letters in this new edition of Rubén Darío's selected writings are indispensable for readers of poetry with an interest in world culture. Darío is no mere literary figure--though he is certainly major in that category--; Darío is a font and fountain of literature and sensibility that bespeaks the New World, and with the bilingual presentation in this book, his poetry speaks our language as well--better than well, beautifully. For the key element in such a volume is, of course, the translation, and here you find three distinguished, widely recognized translators muscially gifting you with their and Darío's voices in ranges you can sing along with by scanning the lefthand-page Spanish. Old favorites--"The Swans," for example--renew themselves here and new discoveries abound.
If you read poetry, perhaps even more if you write poetry, "Rubén Darío: Selected Writings" demands your attention--now!

Embarrassingly bad
Ruben Dario was the first great Spanish symbolist poet and perhaps the greatest of all Latin American poets. It's good to see a substantial selection of his poetry in Spanish in accessible form. The English translations, however, are inept almost beyond belief. What the reader with some Spanish needs is a careful and competent trot, as in the wonderful "Penguin Book of Spanish Verse," where the translator gets every nuance.

What the reader gets is verse translations in which every consideration of meaning is subordinated to the need for rhyme. Moreover, the translators, in the interest of a spurious readability, make no attempt to suggest the orotund classicizing side of Dario's diction. I have the impression that many such poems, among Dario's best, have been suppressed as too difficult and/or unfashionable. Finally, the translators apparently wouldn't recognize a literary allusion or quotation in the original if it fell on them.

The Stavans introduction is just contemptible, as both biography and literary criticism. Stavans' prose style, as always, is just awful. Mr. Stavans, there is no such English word as "illusive"!

I've never written an Amazon review before, but then I've rarely approached a book with such high hopes and been so disappointed.

A Master Poet
Along with Becquer, Ruben Dario is the wellspring of modern Spanish poetry. Poets who followed him-- from Juan Ramon Jimenez to Federico Garcia Lorca or Pablo Neruda-- recognized their debt to this Nicaraguan poet who (Lorca said) "taught maestros and children with a sense of universality and generosity lacking among today's poets. He taught Valle-Inclan and Juan Ramon and the Machado brothers, and his voice was water and saltpeter in the furrow of an ancient language.... Spanish had never known such a feast of words, such a clash of consanants, lights and forms [...] He captured the murmur of the jungle in a single adjective and like fray Luis de Leon, a master of language, he made stellar signals with the lemon and the hoof of a deer and with mollusks full of infinity and terror. He placed the sea - with frigates and shadows-- in the pupils of our eyes, and laid an enormous promenade of gin over the grayest afternoon the sky has ever known. He called the dark north wind by its first name-- all heart, like a Romantic poet--and laid his hand on the Corinthian capital with eternal sadness and ironic doubt." Dario's poetry is translated here by two American poets: Steven F. White, a leading authority on Nicaraguan literature, and Greg Simon, co-author of a memorable translation of "Poet in New York." Readers should be grateful for this selected Dario, which makes an ample selection of poetry and prose accessible to a new generation of English readers.