Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) by Rubén Darío Read Free Book Online

was a popularist, but he surely disliked one aspect of the elitism of poetry: “Ask booksellers how many editions they have published and how many copies they have sold of great poetry, of books of travel, of novels—ask them, and the reply will be terribly mortifying to your spirit! . . .”
    Azul . . . , Prosas profanas, and Cantos de vida y esperanza form a triptych wherein Darío’s stylistic mission is best understood. However, compared with the other two, in Cantos Darío strikes a decidedly amending tone, reformulating his own aesthetics, arguing with his antagonists, and generally looking at his own place as a poet not only at the past and present time but also into posterity. I for one see this volume as Darío’s most compact and complete single volume, but one dealing less with innovation than with recapitulation. At a time when poets died young—among the Modernistas Martí died at the age of 42, Rodó at 46, José Asunción Silva at 31, and Gutiérrez Nájera at 36, only Lugones lived to the “advanced” age of 64—Dario was almost 40 years old, a mature man by the standards of his period. His mood makes him look back and reconsider his previous work. He also feels the need to expand, to look beyond his horizon. Octavio Paz wrote that Darío “expresses himself [here] more soberly, more profoundly, but his love for the brilliant word does not diminish. Nor does his taste for rhythmic innovation disappear; on the contrary, these innovations are surer and more daring.” Cantos de vida y esperanza includes poems to Cervantes and Goya, songs to melancholy, and more than sixty other poems, his most prolific production ever. The book also reflects Darío’s political transformation at the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The struggle shook him to the core. He denounced the United States in a series of poems and articles written for various periodicals. Still, he perceived the United States—or better, he misunderstood it—as a godless empire whose hemispheric fortune was on the rise. He simultaneously admired and detested it, thinking that the best solution for a hemispheric harmony was a neighborly pact between north and south. His poem to Theodore Roosevelt includes one of the most famous words Darío ever wrote: the monosyllabic no . This might sound preposterous; after all, how often does the word appear in his oeuvre? Thousands of times, no doubt. But its position in the poem “To Roosevelt” is exemplary and has been read as a political statement. Herein a fragment:
     
    You’re arrogant and you’re strong, exemplary of your race;
you’re cultivated, you’re skilled, you stand opposed to Tolstoy.
You’re a tamer of horses, you’re a killer of tigers,
you’re like some Alexander mixed with Nebuchadnezzar.
(You must be the Energy Professor
as the crazies today might put it)
     
    You think that life is one big fire,
that progress is just eruption,
that wherever you put bullets,
you put the future, too.
     

No.
     
    The U.S. is a country that is powerful and strong.
When the giant yawns and stretches, the earth feels a tremor
rippling through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you shout, the sound you make is a lion’s roar.
Hugo once said this to Grant: “You possess the stars.”
(The Argentine sun at dawn gives off hardly any light;
and the Chilean star is rising higher . . . ) You’re so rich,
you join the cult to Hercules with the cult to Mammon.
And lighting the broad straight path that leads to easy conquests,
Lady Liberty raises her torch in New York City.
     
    But our own America, which had plenty of poets
even from the ancient times of Netzahualcoyotl,
and which retained the footprints from the feet of Great Bacchus,
and, over the course of time, learned the Panic alphabet:
it sought advice from the stars, and knew of Atlantis,
whose name was a legacy, resonating in Plato.
Even from the most remote moments in its boundless life,
it has lived by light and fire, by