Where does my song come from? - the poet Rubén Darío

So I will pick any poem.  That is what I said to do yesterday.  That’s a way to write about Rubén Darío.

No, not just any poem.  Some of Darío’s earliest poems are neo-Romantic imitations of Bécquer, and his breakthrough was as a poet who moved the innovations of Verlaine and other French avant-gardists into Spanish.  A number of Darío’s early poems are flawless takes on Verlaine.  So not those.

And not the long “Dialogue of the Centaurs,” even though Stanley Appelbaum calls it “very possibly Darío’s finest single poem” (xviii).  It is a philosophical dialogue among centaurs, in rhyming couplets:

I comprehend the secret of animals.  There are malevolent [Malignos]
beings and benevolent ones.  Between them are exchanged signals [signos]
of good and evil, hate or love, or else pain  [pena]
or joy:  the raven is evil and the ringdove is good.  [buena]

Darío’s range grew, though, his formal command and his subject matter.   His set of references moved far past classical antiquity to include the full range of Latin American history and Spanish-language literature, as in his prayer to “Our Lord Don Quixote,” who is enjoined to relieve the poet from his lost faith and “Nietzsche’s supermen,” or the lightly worn couplets of his “Epistle to Mrs. Leopold Lugones.”  And swans, always swans.  But I need to pick a poem.

It is 1906 or 1907.  Darío is living in Majorca for the winter, which sounds all right to me.  The title means “Alas!”:

Eheu!

    Here, beside the Latin sea,
I speak the truth:
In rock, olive oil, and wine I feel
my antiquity.

    Oh, how ancient I am, holy God,
oh how ancient I am!...
Where does my song come from?
And I, where am I going?

    The knowledge of myself
is already costing me
many moments of dejection,
and the how and the when...

    And this Latin clarity and brightness,
what good was it to me
at the entrance to the mine
of the self and the nonself?...

    A contented cloudwalker
I believe I can interpret
the secrets of the wind,
the land and the sea…

    Vague secrets
about being and nonbeing,
and fragments of awareness
about now and yesterday.

    As if in the midst of a wilderness,
I began to cry out;
and I gazed at the seemingly dead sun
and I burst into tears.

Ellipses all Darío’s.  Appelbaum’s translations are meant to assist language learners and are as literal and non-poetic as possible, so they are awfully thumping.  The Spanish verse sings:

    Y esta claridad latina,
¿De qué me sirvío
A la entrada de la mina
Del yo y el no yo…?

But even in prose, this poem has as much “claridad latina” as any of them.  Romantic subjectivity, Modernist cultural exploration; books and nature; that which is right in front of him and those “fragments of awareness” about what he feels must be out there, just within reach of the artist – no, just out of reach, always escaping him.

Thanks to Richard and Stu for Spanish Literature Month.  More, por favor, someday.

And I, lyric poet, mocked Faun, stood there watching the large alabaster birds seemingly making fun of me - Rubén Darío's stories

Where Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was a narrow poet who did one or two things perfectly – although he died young, so who knows what he might have done –  Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío revolutionized Spanish poetry by doing many things well.  I cannot get a fix on him, which makes him hard to write about.  Or perhaps I am wrong  and he is easy to write about.  Pick any poem or story and go, it is bound to be interesting.

So I will ignore his poetry for the moment and look at his stories.   Darío first made his mark with the 1888 Azul…, a volume of “9 stories, 6 poems, and some prose sketches about Chile.”*  Amazing what 9 stories and 6 poems can do.  It “marks the official birth of Modernism,” or so Octavio Paz tells me, although “[t]oday, it is an historical curiosity.”**  Paz means Spanish-language Modernism, modernismo.  Darío was among the first writers – and was likely the best writer – to bring the innovations of contemporary French writers like Paul Verlaine into Spanish.

The stories, or at least the ten I read, are short, punchy, and a lot of fun.  They verge on the prose poem or sketch, but always retain some minimum form of plot and character and visible meaning.  “The Case of Miss Amelia” (1894) is a genuine supernatural fantasy story, even if much of it is a parody of supernatural stories (the frame takes up four of the story’s five pages).  “The Bale” (1887) is pure Naturalism, a short but detailed account by a father of his son’s death in a workplace accident.  No lesson is presented or perhaps even possible.  A fairy story, an allegory, a fable about poetry, a bit of Parisian decadence.  A little of everything.

What do they have in common?  A light touch, aesthetic elegance.  The first line of “The Bale”:  “Far off there, on the line, seemingly drawn in blue pencil, that separates sea and sky, the sun was setting, with its powdery gold and its whorls of purplish sparks (torbellinos de chispas pupuradas), like a huge disk of white-hot iron.”  Every kind of story, even this brutal tale of a meaningless death, is draped with fine writing.

“The Death of the Empress of China” (1890) might be the purest of Darío’s stories.  A sculptor and his wife live in a sort of sticky bliss:

Suzette was the name of the little songbird that had been placed in a silk, plush, and lace cage by an artist, a dreamer and a huntsman who had captured her one May morning when the air was full of light and many rosebuds had opened.

Birdsong, flowers, fragrances fill the little story.  The woman is a metaphorical caged bird, but she also owns a caged bird, one that “becomes sad and stops singing whenever Suzette plays Chopin.”  The sculptor falls in love with a porcelain Chinese empress until the living doll Suzette reasserts her rights; that is the story as such.  Everything is aestheticized.  Is Darío critiquing the idea of “art for art’s sake” in this fantasy, or indulging it, suggesting that people should be treated like art objects.

I don’t know.  Darío’s stories are self-conscious art objects, meant to be admired on occasion and then returned to their jewel case.

The cryptic title is from a different story, "The Nymph (A Parisian Tale)," which is about imagination and inspiration, plus it mentions swans.  Darío was obsessed with swans.

* Stories and Poems, the 2002 Dover book edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum, is my source for the stories.  The quote is on p. xi.

**  The version of the Paz essay I read is in Selected Poems of Rubén Darío, 1965, University of Texas Press, tr. Lysander Kemp.