. . , come from an undeniably Spanish stock, at least in their form.” While Paris was Darío’s center of cultural gravity, one ought to keep in mind that he was imagining the metropolis from his sojourns in Nicaragua and Chile. He would never be more Parisian than when he was still unacquainted with Paris, imagining its landscape through readings of his favorite authors. Notice also the use of the ellipsis after Azul . . . : Darío seems to invite the reader to enter with him that realm of dreams he is so eagerly striving for. His Catholic worldview had, as its counterpoint in the poetry, heterodox, pagan concepts. He styled himself a dilettante, and all in all succeeded in mastering that “profession.” The poetic and prose experiments followed a similar approach: “the application to Spanish of certain verbal superiorities from other languages, in this case mainly French,” Darío explained. For yes, the material is aristocratic in nature; it is also unapologetically erudite. The author exploits the etymology of words. He lets his style be driven by a melodious inner voice, focusing on rhythm not only in his stanzas, which are governed by syllabic meter, but also in his prose.

Azul . . . contains classic pieces like “About Winter” and “To a Poet.” And in a literary mode that Darío would repeatedly return to, he included in this volume what he called medallones, a text written in homage—in the form of an ornament, a medallion—to an influential figure, Whitman for instance. Darío saw the good gray poet simultaneously as an emperor and a priestly presence who strove toward true democracy by encouraging the sailor to row, the eagle to fly, and the laborer to work. Darío praised Whitman in this way:

 

His boundless soul resembles a mirror.
His weary shoulders deserve the best cloak.
He sings his song like a modern seer,
strumming on a lyre cut from ancient oak.

 

Yes, much like Borges and Neruda after him, Darío thoroughly admired Whitman. The very name of the American master required him to take a breath. “Whitman, maestro Whitman,” sighed the Nicaraguan poet, “broke all the rules and, guided by instinct, went back to the Hebrew line. And I must concur with the diagnosis of the Jew Nordau with respect to the immense poet of Leaves of Grass, that rare, strange—passing strange, degenerate—Whitman, yet honored, too, Maeterlinck’s master, that strong, cosmic Yankee. We, dear maestro, the young poets of the Spanish Americas, are preparing the way, because our own Whitman must be soon to come, our indigenous Walt Whitman, filled with the world, saturated with the universe, like that other Whitman of the north, chanted so beautifully by ‘our’ Martí. And no one would be surprised if in this vast cosmopolis, this alembic of souls and races, where Andrade of the symbolic Atlántida lived his life and this young savage Lugones has just appeared, there might appear some precursor of that poet heralded by the enigmatic and terrible Montevideo madman, in his prophetic and terrifying book.”

In this Penguin Classics anthology, azul, “blue” in Spanish, is not translated as blue. As Andrew Hurley suggests in his translator’s note to the section of stories and fables, the alternative choice, azure, is closer in spirit to Darío’s intention: while avoiding associations with “the blues” and “being blue,” it foregrounds an association Darío made with fairy tales (“cuentos azules” in Spanish) filled with princesses, castles, and knights in shining armor (or “Prince Charmings,” “principes azules,” literally “blue knights,” in Spanish). The title of that first influential collection, in Darío’s view, pointed to the color of daydreams, an azure found in the work of Victor Hugo, “the color of art, a Hellenic, Homeric color, a color oceanic and firmamental, the coeruleum which in Pliny is the simple color that resembles the sky, and sapphires.”

In any case, Azul . . . ought to be read as an itinerary of sorts, announcing the direction Darío would take in his life-long oeuvre. Most of the attention it commands comes from its crystalline stanzas. But it also contains stories such as “The Bourgeois King,” subtitled “A Cheering Tale,” about a pompous monarch who hires a poet to play the organ in his garden parties, “near the swans.” The fairy tales function as an excuse for Darío to analyze two social types: an emerging bourgeoisie in Latin America, uninterested in art, and the artist with lofty ideals.