Free Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) by Rubén Darío Page A

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