The life of Rubén
Darío (1867-1916), the greatest
poet of Spanish
America and one
of thesupreme
technicians in the language, reads as a tragicomedy.
He was born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento
in the Nicaraguan
town of Metapa in 1867. now renamed in his honour. His parents
separated when he was two, and as a child prodigy, Darío
was brought up by an aunt in León, where he started
contributing to local newspapers. In 1881 he moved to Managua,
fell in love with the unfaithful Rosario Murillo, was spirited
away to El Salvador (1882), returned to Nicaragua (1883)
and then went to Chile (1886), where he published the first
edition of Azul
(1888). He returned to Nicaragua and El Salvador, married
Rafaela Contreras in 1890, and took to drink (and a forced
marriage with Rosario) when Rafaela died in 1893. Thereafter,
the pattern
of his life was established: short-lived
government positions in various
Latin American administrations, a tangled
love life, continual travel (many European countries
and Morocco), incessant contributions to newspapers, many
of which he founded, and increasing incapacity through drink.
Miraculously, the gift
largely survived. Prosas
profanes y otras poemas appeared in 1896, Cantos
de vida y esperanza in 1905, Poema
del otono y otros poemas in 1910, and Canto a
la Argentina y otros poemas in 1914. On a visit to Spain
in 1899, Darío began a relationship with Francisca
Sánchez, a simple country girl who bore him several
children. But Rosario snatched him back, and Darío
died of cirrhosis of the liver in his boyhood town of León,
where he is buried in the cathedral.
Darío's
poetry
Darío was the leading exponent of modernismo,
a fusion of the French ParnassianandSymbolist
movements, which has no
English equivalent. Modernismo began in Cuba (José
Martí), Mexico
(Manuel
Gutiérrez Nájera) and Argentina (Olegario
Andrade & Rafael
Obligado)as a development from Romanticism. Originally
influenced by the Parnassians and Góngora,
the movement aimed at verse of intricate and brilliant imagery,
taking the visual
arts as a model. Later, with Darío,
the movement absorbed the musical evocation of the Symbolists,
along with its preciosity, eroticism and exotic reference.
Musicality of language and prosodic virtuosity are preeminent
in Darío, whose poems in no less than 37 metres and
136 stanza patterns did much to reinvigorate
Spanish poetry. The vocabulary was equally diverse, and
included borrowings from antiquity onwards and his own coinages.
The usual symbols of a para-religious approach to poetry
(taken from dreams, occultism and depth psychiatry) appear,
but Darío had his own: centaur (human & bestial
traits), forest (gradation from gross to ethereal) and the
swan (purity and eroticism). Arcane concerns today, but
a reminder of the many dimensions of poetry.
Modernismo
Though older
generations in Latin America have his poems
by heart, Darío is hardly a potent influence
on the current literary scene and is not as well known to
English readers asNeruda or the
pre-Revolution poets
of Spain (which is
why so few links here are to English
texts.) The usual political dimension of Latin American
literature is missing. As an individual, Darío was
as nationalistic
as anyone, but he wrote a poesie pure that transcends
national and social questions, often mundane realities altogether.
His autobiographies (1912, 1913) are incomplete, and the
few poems that seem autobiographical (Canción
de otono en primavera, etc.) are only loosely modelled
on personal experience. Darío's is a poetry made
rather than expressed, one carefully constructed from the
individual properties of words (literal meanings, rhythm,
colour, everyday connotations, literary antecedents), and
therefore somewhat artificial
or declamatory by today's standards. Modernismo faded gradually
from the Spanish American scene, in the works of Leopold
Lugones, Amado
Nerva, Luis
Urbina, Rufino
Blanco Fombona, Julio
Herrara y Reissig, Ricardo
Jaimes Freyre, Guillermo
Valencia, José
Santos Chacano, José
María Eguren, Manuel
Magallanes Moure, Carlos
Pezoa Véliz,Enrique
González Martínez, and many others —
writers worth investigating by those attracted to the sheer
craft of poetry.
