| |
Praises
for Ruben Dario's work
Octavio Paz:
According to the textbooks, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
were the Golden Age of Spanish literature. Juan Ramón Jiménez
has said that they were not gold but gilded cardboard. It would be fairer
to say that they were the centuries of Spanish rage. During that period
the Spaniards wrote, painted, and dreamed in the same frenzy in which they
destroyed and created nations. Everything was carried to the extremes:
they were the first to circumnavigate the earth, and at the same time they
were the inventors of quietism. They rage with a thirst for space, a hunger
for death. Lope de Vega was prolific, even profligate: he wrote something
over one thousand plays. Sor Juan de la Cruz was temperate, even miserly:
his poetical works consist of three longish lyrics and a few songs and
ballads. It was delirium of Cervantes, Velázquez, Calderón.
Quevedo's labyrinth of conceits. Góngora's jungle of verbal stalactites.
And then, quite suddenly, the stage was bare, as if the whole performance
had been illusions rather than historical reality. Nothing was left, or
nothing but ghostly reflections. During all of the eighteenth century there
was no Swift or Pope, no Rousseau or Laclos, anywhere in Spanish literature.
In the second half of the nineteenth century a few faint signs of life
began to appear--for instance Bécquer, whom Rubén Darío
imitated in his early Rhymes-- but there was no one to compare with Coleridge,
Leopardi, Holderlin, no one who resembled Baudelaire. And then, toward
the close of the century, everything changed again, just as suddenly, just
as violently. The new writers had not been expected (most certainly they
had not been invited), and at first their voices were drowned out by the
jeers. But a few years later, through the efforts of the very figures whom
the "serious" critics had called Frenchified outsiders, the Spanish
language was on its feet, was alive again. It was not as opulent as it
had been during the Baroque period, but it was stronger, clearer, better
controlled.
The last mayor Baroque poet was a Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz. Two centuries later, the revival of Spanish literature--and
of the language itself--was also accomplished, or at least begun, here
in the New World. The movement known as Modernism, of which Rubén
Darío became the leader, had a double importance in the literature
of the Spanish-speaking world. On the one hand, it produced four or five
poets who linked up the great chain that had come apart at the end of the
seventeenth century. On the other hand, to change metaphors, it smashed
windows and broke doors so that the fresh air of the times could revive
the dying language. Modernism was not merely a school of poetry: it was
also a dancing class, a gymnasium, a circus, and masked ball. Ever since,
Spanish has been able to put up with the most raucous noises, the most
dangerous escapades. And the influence of Modernism has not ended: everything
written in Spanish afterward has been affected in one way or another by
that great renascence.
[...]Rubén Darío was the bridge between the precursors
and the second generation of Modernism. His constant travels and his generous
activity in behalf of others made him the point of connection for the many
scattered poets and groups on two continents. He not only inspired and
captained the battle, he was also its observer and critic. The evolution
of this poetry, from Blue to Poem of Autumn, corresponds with that of the
movement, which began with him and ended with him. But his work did not
end with Modernism: he went beyond it, beyond the language of that school
and, in fact, of every school. Darío was not only the richest and
most ample of the Modernist poets: he was one of the great moderns poets.
At times, he reminds us of Poe; at other times, of Whitman. Of the first,
in that portion of his work in which he scorns the world of the Americas
to seek an otherworldly music; of the second, in that portion in which
he expresses his vitalist affirmations, his pantheism, and his belief that
he was, in his own right, the bard of Latin America as Whitman was of Anglo-
America.
From Selected Poems of Rubén Darío. Translated
by Lysander Kemp. University of Texas, Austin, 1988.
With the death of Rubén Darío, the Spanish language
loses its greatest poet of today,-the greatest because of the aesthetic
value and the historical significance of his work. No one, since the times
of Góngora and Quevedo, has wielded an influence comparable, in
renewing power, to Darío's. Zorrilla's influence, for instance,
was enormous, but not in the sense of a true innovation: when it spread,
the romantic movement he represented was already the dominant force in
our literature. Darío did much more, in prosody and in style as
well as in the spirit of poetry. Darío's victory was not without
surprising elements,-especially because, born in the New World, he was
unreservedly acclaimed by the intellectual groups of our former metropolis,
Madrid. The homage of the Spanish writers to Darío was great and
sincere. Even Royal Academicians, in spite of the timidity natural in traditional
institutions, paid signal tribute to his genius. Upon the news of his death,
the writers and artists of Spain, headed by Valle-Inclán (the greatest
literary force in the present generation), organized a movement to erect
a monument to his memory in the royal gardens of the Buen Retiro.
Darío began, when very young, writing quite within the traditions
of our language and literature. He was a reader of both the classics and
the moderns, and essayed such widely different tones as those corresponding
to the solemnity of the blank verse and to the fluency of the romance.
Soon after, he took up the study of the modern French and, partly, the
English literatures; and his poetry, in Azul, began to show the marvelous
variety of shading and the preciosity of workmanship which were to be his
distinctive traits in Prosas profanas. His most important achievement was
the book of Cantos de vida y esperanza. There he attained (especially in
the autobiographical Pórtico) a depth of human feeling and a sonorous
splendor of utterance, which place him among the modern poets of first
rank in any language. His later work did not always rise to that magnificence,
but it often took a bold, rough-hewn, sort of Rodinesque form, which has
found many admires.
As a prosodist, Rubén Darío is unique in Spanish. He
is the poet who has mastered the greatest variety of verse forms. The Spanish
poets of the last four centuries, whether in Europe or in America, although
they tried several measures, succeeded only in a few. Like the Italians
before Carducci, they had command only over the hendecasyllabic, octosyllabic
and heptasyllabic forms. A few meters, besides these three, have at times
enjoyed popularity, as, for instance, the alexandrine during the romantic
period: but they suffered from stiffness of accentuation. Darío,
and the modernist groups which sprang into action mainly through his stimulus,
gave vogue, and finally permanence, to a large number of metrical forms:
either verses rarely used, like the enneasyllabic and the dodecasyllabic
(of which there are three types), or verses, like the alexandrine, to which
Darío gave greater musical virtue by freeing the accent and the
caesura. Even the hendecasyllable acquired new flexibility when Darío
brought back two new forms of accentuation that had been used by Spanish
poets during three centuries but had been forgotten since about 1800. He
also attacked the problem of the classic hexameter, which has tempted many
great modern poets, from Goethe to Swinburne and Carducci, and, before
these, a few of the Spanish in the XVIIth century, chiefly Villegas. He
introduced, finally, the modern vers libre, the type in which the number
of feet, but not the foot, changes (as in the Marcha triunfal), as well
as the type in which both the number of syllables and the foot vary frequently.
In style, Rubén Darío represents another renewal. He
not only fled from the hackneyed, from expressions which, like coins, were
worn out by use: it is the natural outcome of every new artistic or literary
tendency to do away with the useless remains of former styles. He did much
more; together with a few others, like Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera
of Mexico, Darío brought back into Spanish the art, all but absent
from Spanish poetry during two centuries, had been substituted by the forceful
drawing and vivid coloring which foreigners expect to find in all things
in Spanish.
In the spirit of poetry, Rubén Darío succeeded in giving
"des frissons nouveaux." If not the first, he was one of the
first (simultaneously with Gutiérrez Nájera, with Julian
del Casal, of Cuba, and José Asunción Silva, of Colombia)
to bring into Spanish the notes of subtle emotion of which Verlaine was
arch master; thegracefulness and the brilliancy which emerge from the world
of Versaillesque court and feigned Arcadies; the decorative sense of a
merely external Hellenism, which is delightful in its frank artificiality;
the suggestions of exotic worlds, opulent storehouses of imaginative treasures.
But, while he did all this, he never lost his native force: he was,
and he knew how to be, American, -Spanish-American, rather. He sang of
his race, of his people, -the whole Spanish-speaking family of nations,
-with constant love, with tenderness, which at times was almost childlike.
If he did not always think that life in the New World was poetical, he
did think that the ideals of Spanish America were worthy of his poetry.
And, as he upheld the ideals of Spanish America, and the traditions of
the whole Spanish race; since he sang hymns to the Cid, founder of the
old mother country, and to the master spirits of the new countries, like
Mitre of Argentina, both Spain and Spanish America saw in him their representative
poet.
Rubén Darío was born near León, in the Republic
of Nicaragua, the 18th of January, 1867, and died in that city on the 6th
of February, 1916. He received his education there, but went abroad in
his twentieth year. He visited nearly all the countries of the Western
Hemisphere and traveled extensively in Europe since 1892. He lived many
years at Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Madrid and Paris. At Madrid he
was at one time the Minister of Nicaragua.
He visited the United States, in a short trip, in 1893, and again
during the winter of 1914 and 1915. He was then honored by several literary
bodies of New York, such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters and
the Authors' League. The Hispanic Society of America awarded him its honorary
medal. Many of his poems, and some of his short stories and articles, have
been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and the
Scandinavian languages.
from Eleven Porms of Rubén Darío G.P. Putnanm's
Sons, New York and London, 1916
|