His itinerant pieces on countries he visited, such as Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Hungary are provocative. (It is regrettable that the Nicaraguan never looked at the landscape of the Americas with the same consideration he devoted to Europe.) For him the Old Continent was a destination that piqued his curiosity, whereas this side of the Atlantic Ocean was a mere place of departure. Darío, of course, was a decadent. For him, as for most of his peers in Latin America, a journey to the center of Western Civilization was a rite of passage. (Has this asymmetrical approach finally changed? Perhaps only by expanding the destination to the United States as well. At the end of the twentieth century, a visit to New York, not Paris, was de rigueur for any serious young Mexican, Argentine, Venezuelan, Columbian . . . writer whose goal was to shape a promising career.) Darío’s prose did not go through stylistic changes the way his poetry did, nor did it have the same impact on his readership. In it the Nicaraguan reacts to his immediate circumstance: people, places, books. Chronology is considerably less significant in this, so the material doesn’t include bracketed dates.

I’ve been a devoted reader of his oeuvre since my teens, when I first read Los raros during my college years in Mexico and was overwhelmed by his sonnets, memorizing dozens of poems, starting with “De invierno” (About Winter) and “Lo fatal” (Destined to Die). After I immigrated to the United States in 1985, it became my dream to see Rubén Darío find a space of his own in the English language in a way that wouldn’t make him sound awkward. The power of his verbal art and his astounding influence more than justify the endeavor. It took a long time to complete the task but the energy and encouragement I received from numerous people allowed me—and the team we finally put together—to remain focused. In this volume I did not just seek to introduce Darío in a comprehensive, responsible fashion, offering a context against which to understand his contribution. I also wanted readers to appreciate his polyphonic talents. That polyphony, in my eyes, at least, suggests that there are at least two Daríos, if not more: one a glorious poet, the other an emblematic narrator. Since I wanted him to have as close to a perfect pitch in Shakespeare’s tongue as he has in Cervantes’s, I sought different translators who would be able to give the Nicaraguan the exact touch he requires in the different genres he mastered. Intriguingly, the approaches taken by Simon and White in the poetry part, and by Hurley in its prose counterpart, offer alternative lessons in the art of translation. The reader will quickly notice that the language used in each of these parts is different: for the poetry, the translators have intentionally brought Darío to the present tense, making him current today. Their renditions answer the question: How does this late-nineteenth-century Modernista sound to today’s ears? Hurley’s approach moves in the opposite direction, bringing the contemporary reader to the past. He does not reimagine Darío’s fiction and nonfiction using present-day colloquialisms. Instead, he makes use of the English of the time to place the Nicaraguan in a period to which he belongs in chronological terms. Hurley states that “Just as in Spanish Darío reminds one of the English and French writers that were pursuing similar themes and aesthetic concerns at the same time as he (because he was, in fact, ‘translating’ them), so I have wanted Darío, in English, to sit firmly in that tradition. Thus, a ‘timeless’ yet identifiably fin-de-siècle language and style seemed called for, and I simply ‘back-translated’ Darío into a tradition the English reader is already perfectly familiar with.”

This double strategy might be disruptive to some, resulting in a composite picture of Darío that is schizophrenic. But the opposite is true. The Rubén Darío showcased in this anthology is a man for all seasons. It is our duty to appreciate him in full in each and every one of them. After all, he was a polymath, a sum of parts. Why simplify him? Shouldn’t each of those parts command our attention? Neither of the translating methods used in these pages is better than the other.