Free Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) by Rubén Darío

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
    Horseman on a rare Pegasus, who reached an impossible realm . . .
    — 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