Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben)

001

RUBÉN DARÍO : SELECTED WRITINGS

RUBÉN DARÍO (Félix García Sarmiento) was born in Metapa (renamed Ciudad Darío), a small town in Nicaragua, on January 18th, 1867. His parents soon separated. His mother took him to Honduras, but eventually returned to Nicaragua and Darío was raised in León. He was writing epitaphs in verse on commission by age eleven, and his first verses were published when he was thirteen years old in the newspaper El Termómetro. In 1884, Darío worked as a presidential staff member under the regime of Adán Cárdenas, as well as in the National Library. He made his first trip to Chile in 1886, and debuted as a poet in book form with Abrojos in 1887, but it was the combination of poetry and prose in Azul . . . (1888) that made him famous and transformed him into the lightning rod of the Modernista movement in the Spanish-speaking Americas. Soon after, Darío began contributing to the Argentine daily La Nación, a professional relationship that would last until his death. In Nicaragua, he married Rafaela Contreras Cañas, the first of three wives with whom he would have four children, two of whom died in infancy. A coup d’etat in Nicaragua in 1890 forced him to move to Guatemala and El Salvador. Darío was named secretary of the Nicaraguan delegation in charge of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1892 and also made his first, revelatory trip to Spain. Rafaela Contreras Cañas died soon after. Months later, Darío married Rosario Murillo. In 1893 Darío met Paul Verlaine in Paris, and, in New York, José Martí, with whom he forged a friendship. In 1896 his books Los Raros [The Misfits] and Prosas profanas y otros poemas [Profane Prose and Other Poems] were published. He also started to serialize a novel called El hombre de oro [Man of Gold], which was influenced by Flaubert’s Salambó. In 1898 the Spanish-American War took place and shook Darío to the core. He denounced the United States in a series of poems and articles written for various periodicals. A year later, he traveled to Barcelona, then to Madrid. His experiences in Spain would be described in the chronicles and literary portraits of España contemporánea [Contemporary Spain] (1901). In 1899 he met Ramón María Valle-Inclán, Juan Ramón Jiménez, as well as Francisca Sánchez, an illiterate peasant from Navalsáuz, whom Darío taught to read. The couple relocated in Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for La Nación, focusing on the Exposition Universelle de Paris. In 1903 he became consul of Nicaragua in Paris, where he had already met Antonio and Manuel Machado. From there he visited Barcelona and a year later traveled to Gibraltar, Morocco, and various locations in Spain. His book Cantos de vida y esperanza: Los cisnes y otros poemas [Songs of Life and Hope/Swans and Other Poems] appeared in 1905, followed a couple of years later by El canto errante [Wandering Song]. Darío was named to a diplomatic post in Spain by the Nicaraguan government in 1907 while he was in the country trying unsuccessfully to annul his marriage to Rosario Murillo. In 1909 he published Alfonso XIII and El viaje a Nicaragua e Intermezzo tropical [Voyage to Nicaragua and Tropical Intermezzo]. Poema del otoño y otros poemas [Autumn Poems and Other Poems] appeared in 1910, which is also when he visited Mexico to participate in the centenary commemoration of El Grito de Dolores [The Cry of Dolores] just as that country was about to be swept by a peasant revolution.