Stumbling Upon One Of The World's Most Important Poets

"In Spanish, there is poetry before and after Rubén Dario," Yale professor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria wrote in a February 2006 article in The Nation. And yet I'm ashamed to admit that if it weren't for a couple of thieves, I still wouldn't have read him.

In a story that rippled (if only slightly) the international news wires this past week, two men stole a ceremonial sword that belonged to Dario from his former home--now a museum--in Leon, Nicaragua. They chose not to swipe the poet's more valuable manuscripts (perhaps offering evidence that the thieves knew him about as well as I did).

How valuable are the manuscripts? From a literary perspective: very. Here's how Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz described the state of Spanish literature for the decades preceding Dario's work: "The stage was bare...Nothing was left, or nothing but ghostly reflections." Into this, a poet of the new world breathed new life.

The stolen sword is a fine introduction into who Dario was--a fitting symbol of the poet's worldliness. Dario carried it while serving as Nicaragua's ambassador to Spain in the early 1900s. During his lifetime he made his home in Madrid, along with El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, and Paris, in addition to his native Nicaragua, and he absorbed the literary lessons of the world. He adopted the ideas of French symbolists like Paul Verlaine; the Romanticism of Victor Hugo; and the metrical experiments of Edgar Allan Poe.

The great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca addressed this richness in a speech at the Pen club in Buenos Aires in 1933 which he delivered with celebrated Chilean poet Pablo Neruda to celebrate Dario's work. Lorca exclaimed:

"We are going to fling a great name onto the table, with the assurance that the glasses will break, that the forks will jump up and seek the eyes they long for, and that a crash of the sea will stain the tablecloth...The fertile substance of his great poetry stands solidly outside of norms, forms, and schools."

It was the genius of Dario that as he expanded the scope of Spanish Literature he also distilled it. Like American and European Modernists, he sought to rid the language of tired, worn out words and phrases to create a more concise art form. Paz wrote that the Spanish Modernist movement "began with him and ended with him."

So why hasn't Dario reached the acclaim of Neruda, Lorca or Paz--all of whom deeply admired him? Echevarria claims that Dario is one of those poets "condemned to remain within their own language." A man whose genius, put simply, is difficult to translate. The finest translations, he claims, are by Lysander Kemp in Selected Poems of Ruben Dario (from University of Texas Press). Here are a few of my favorites:

Faraway

Ox that I saw in my childhood, as you steamed
in the burning gold on the Nicaraguan sun,
there on the rich plantation filled with tropical
harmonies; woodland dove, of the woods that sang
with the sound of the wind, of axes, of birds and wild bulls:
I salute you both, because you are both my life.

You, heavy ox, evoke the gentle dawn
that signaled it was time to milk the cow,
when my existence was all white and rose;
and you, sweet mountain dove, cooing and calling,
you signify all that my own springtime, now
so far away, possessed of the Divine Springtime.

Fatality

The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;
the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:
there is no pain as great as being alive,
no burden heavier than that of conscious life.

To be, and to know nothing, and to lack a way,
and the dread of having been, and future terrors...
And the sure terror of being dead tomorrow,
and to suffer all through life and through the darkness,

and through what we do not know and hardly suspect...
And the flesh that temps us with bunches of cool grapes,
and the tomb that awaits us with its funeral sprays,
and not to know where we go,
nor whence we came!...

My favorite poem of Dario's (so far) is "To Roosevelt," which he aimed at our 26th President, Teddy. It reflects South and Central America's concerns about U.S. imperialism after the Spanish American War and correctly predicts the policies the United States would take towards Latin America. This is just an excerpt--you can read the entire poem here.

To Roosevelt

The voice that would reach you, Hunter, must speak
in Biblical tones, or in the poetry of Walt Whitman.
You are primitive and modern, simple and complex;
you are one part George Washington and one part Nimrod.
You are the United States,
future invader of our naive America
with its Indian blood, an America
that still prays to Christ and still speaks Spanish.

You are strong, proud model of your race;
you are cultured and able; you oppose Tolstoy.
You are an Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar,
breaking horses and murdering tigers.
(You are a Professor of Energy,
as current lunatics say).

You think that life is a fire,
that progress is an eruption,
that the future is wherever
your bullet strikes.
No.

The United States is grand and powerful.
Whenever it trembles, a profound shudder
runs down the enormous backbone of the Andes.
If it shouts, the sound is like the roar of a lion.

You'll be happy to know that police--just a few days ago--recovered Dario's sword. But as his name slips back out of the international spotlight, I hope he gains at least a few more readers.