Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the annus mirabilis in Darío’s career, two of his most important books, Los raros (The Misfits) and Prosas profanas y otros poemas (Profane Prose and Other Poems), were published by Imprenta Pablo E. Coni, their publication costs paid by Carlos Vega Belgrano, editor of Argentina’s El Tiempo, a newspaper for which Darío regularly wrote. These two efforts are fascinating in that they push Darío’s aesthetic views to new dimensions. Los raros, published in Argentina, includes profiles of characters Darío is attracted to (Poe, Verlaine, Rachilde, Villiers de Lisle d’Adam, et al.). Their appeal is to be found in the desire they nurture to not adapt their needs to society, to break rules, to rebel. In Prosas profanas, on the other hand, the term “profane” is crucial: Darío strove for a poetics akin to his age, connected to Catholicism but seeking alternative modes of faith. He looked toward mythology, and he also looked toward pre-Columbian history. His memoir Historia de mis libros (The Story of My Books), serialized in Buenos Aires’s La Nación in 1913, along with his autobiography, allow us to understand Darío’s own perception of his poetic mission. In that first book, he writes: “[In] all the Spanish Americas, no one held any end or object for poetry save the celebration of native glories, the events of Independence, the American nature: an eternal hymn to Junín, an endless ode to the agriculture of the torrid zone, and stirring patriotic songs. I did not deny that there was a great treasure trove of poetry in our prehistoric times, in the Conquest, and even in the colony, but with our subsequent social and political state had come intellectual dwarfism and historical periods more suitable for the blood-dripping penny dreadful than the noble canto. Yet I added: ‘Buenos Aires—cosmopolis! And tomorrow!’ The proof of this prophecy can be found in my recent ‘Canto to Argentina.’ ”
    This volume again contains classical examples of Darío’s aesthetics, including a sonatina about a princess, an early poem about a swan, and a couple of poems that might well be considered his ars poetica : “Love Your Rhythm” and “I’m Hunting a Form.” In the former, Darío, in a self-referential voice, maps out his poetic pursuit, offering a vision of the poet as a medium between the earthly and celestial spheres. The poem includes this stanza:
     
    The celestial oneness you surely are
will make worlds sprout in you that are diverse,
and if your meters start to sound dispersed,
use Pythagoras to unite your stars.
     
    The sonnet “I’m Hunting a Form,” on the other hand, is the most representative of Darío’s confessional pieces. It mixes classical and mythical ingredients, from the Venus de Milo to Sleeping Beauty, concluding with the swan, specifically its question mark-shaped neck, as a symbol of doubt. This is a memorable disquisition on the evasiveness and vulnerability of poetry. The last two stanzas read:
     
    I can only find words that never seem to stay,
pieces of a song from a flute, which slip away,
the ship of those dreams, which drift aimlessly in space.
     
    And under my Sleeping Beauty’s open window,
the soft and steady crying of the fountain’s flow,
and the swan’s great white neck, with its questions, its grace.
     
    On the other hand, Los raros is, in my estimation, one of Darío’s most bizarre, most daring works. Mexican critic Jaime Torres Bodet once said that the book contains portraits of artists better known for their proclivity toward the uncanny than for their authentic genius, and more apt to produce episodic—that is, forgettable—art than art that is likely to endure throughout the ages. But a mere list of those discussed by Darío instantaneously proves the thesis wrong: Martí, Poe (who, according to Dario, “passed his life, one might say, under the floating influence of a strange mystery”), Ibsen, Verlaine, Léon Bloy, and Isadora Duncan, to name only a