Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) Read Online Free PDF

even though he wrote copiously on the imperial hopes of the United States in the Spanish-speaking hemisphere. While Martí remained focused on Cuba no matter where he was throughout the Americas and in exile in Key West and New York, Darío wandered the globe. Darío’s itinerant agenda as a diplomat, journalist, and traveler brought him to distant regions—distant at least for a citizen of a small, impoverished nation such as Nicaragua.
    Darío was comfortable with the effort behind Modernismo, although he grew suspicious of the rubric itself. In his eyes the movement should have represented progress in a myriad of areas, from science to technology, from economics to education. He envisioned—and with enormous enthusiasm—a transition for the Americas from an awkward, dependent region still lingering in its mediocrity, stuck in a dogmatic tradition, and blindly loyal to a feudal Spain, to a fully cosmopolitan society attuned to the principles and fashions of the West. This, for him, was the announcement of a new type of life. This Modernismo, he stated, “is beginning to give us a place apart, a place that is independent.” It must be kept in mind that with the exception of the luminous seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz and an improbably small cadre of americanistas, the number of authors from the New World that were recognized at all in Spain was insignificant. So for Darío and his peers, recognition in Madrid was important, since it meant legitimacy: if the former colonial power could validate their work, the status of that work was automatically more solid, less ethereal.
    There was much debate in Spain at the time about the accuracy of describing the overall effort as Modernismo and about the ultimate endurance of the work. Juan Valera, in a column called “American Letters” for the literary supplement of the newspaper El Imparcial, expressed his enthusiasm. He remarked on Darío’s French tone and the highly polished Spanish of the pieces. Valera eventually wrote to Darío: “None of the men of letters of the Peninsula that I have known with more cosmopolitan spirit, and that have resided for a longer time in France, and that have spoken French and other foreign languages better, have ever seemed to me so deeply filled with the spirit of France as you, sir: not Galiano, not Eugenio de Ochoa, not Miguel de los Santos Alvarez.” Valera added a little later: “It seems that here, a Nicaraguan author who never set foot out of Nicaragua except to go to Chile, and who is an author so à la mode de Paris and with such ‘chic’ and distinction, has been able to anticipate fashion and even modify and impose it.”
     
    In 1890, a couple of years after Azul . . . was published, a coup d’etat in Nicaragua forced Darío to move to Guatemala, then to El Salvador. In 1891, his son Rubén Darío Contreras was born in Costa Rica. In 1892 he also made his first, revelatory trip to Spain, a country with which he had an emotional relationship described in the chronicles and literary portraits of España contemporánea (Contemporary Spain, 1901). This was the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Americas, and Darío was on the verge of replicating, at the aesthetic level, Simón Bolívar’s effort to achieve continental independence from Spain. Over time he met several Spanish writers with whom he established a lasting friendship; some of them, including Ramón María Valle-Inclán, Antonio and Manuel Machado, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, later to win the Nobel Prize for literature, became supporters or wrote prologues for his books. It was also at this time that Rafaela Contreras Cañas died. Shortly after, Darío married his second wife, Rosario Murillo.
    Darío finally traveled to Paris in the early 1890s. There he at last met one of his idols, Paul Verlaine, and, on a trip to New York, he forged a friendship with Martí. Three years later, in 1896, now known as