great cities’ forces,
rumbling of iron and towers,
swift hippogriff shielded in steel,
electric roses and flowers
plucked from the Arabian Nights,
Babylonian pomp, bells, lights,
trumpets, rumbling wheels, yoked oxen,
voices of pianos from parlors,
profound and piercing human moans,
children singing as one in class,
people hawking things in the street,
one tense fiber keeping the beat,
living in life’s most vital core
the way a heart goes on beating,
the way this crowd goes on breathing
in the chest of the city they adore.
This poem allows modern readers to see Dario’s views of minorities. It is indisputable that by our standards, his views are, to use the jargon of our own day, politically incorrect. His opinion of Jews, for instance, is troubling. While in a portion of “Canto a la Argentina” that is not included in this volume, he commands:
Sing Jews of the Pampa!
Young men of rude appearance,
sweet Rebeccas with honest eyes,
Reubens of long locks,
patriarchs of white
dense, horselike hair.
Sing, sing old Sarahs
and adolescent Benjamins
with the voice of our heart:
“We have found Zion!”,
in a poem called “Israel” his portrait of Jews rotates around their need to believe in Christ. Likewise, he approached blacks as inferior people. And while he idealized the pre-Columbian past, he never directly addressed the plight of the indigenous people contemporary to him. Still, within Nicaragua his relatively enlightened attitude was appreciated. Pablo Antonio Cuadra, arguably one of the most significant post- Rubenista poets in Nicaragua, who died in 2002, argued: “Darío was the first in the tradition of our literatura culta, the nation’s high-brow letters, not only to point to lo indio as a fountain of literary originality and authenticity but also to proclaim, against the complexes and prejudices of his age, mestizo pride.”
As a whole the issue of minorities in Darío is a controversial one and is in need of revaluation. Clearly, it is intimately linked in Latin America to questions of class. How did he view the difference between whiteness and brownness, between the Europeanized elite in Central America whose roots were in the Iberian Peninsula, and the rest of the population? What about immigration and the effort at the end of the nineteenth century by various governments on this side of the Atlantic to “recolonize” the provinces by opening the doors to Italian, German, and Jewish newcomers? Similarly, it is important to reassess Darío’s understanding of the duality between center and periphery, which I glanced at earlier on in this introduction. To what extent did his “colonial” mentality become the engine that made him conquer Spain by storm? And what is one to say about his approach to sex, death, and the human body in general? The reader of Darío’s prose in particular is likely to find an unsettling answer to this question.
In the end, though, what was the secret of Darío’s success? He himself answered the question thus: “My success—it would be absurd not to confess it—has been due to novelty. . . . And this novelty, what has it consisted of? A mental gallicism. When I read Groussac I did not know he was a Frenchman writing in Spanish. But he taught me to think in French ; after that, my young, happy heart claimed Gallic citizenship.” As World War I was raging, Darío published the first of three volumes of his selected poems, which he himself chose and organized. It appeared in Madrid under the auspices of Biblioteca Corona: Muy siglo XVIII (And Those that Come from the Eighteenth Century, 1914). Two other volumes followed, completing a trilogy in which Darío sought to reconfigure his work thematically. These were Muy antiguo y muy moderno (Some Both Ancient and Modern, 1915) and Y una sed de ilusiones infinita (And a Thirst for Illusive Hope That’s Endless, 1916). It was around the time of the third volume’s publication that Darío fell gravely ill
rumbling of iron and towers,
swift hippogriff shielded in steel,
electric roses and flowers
plucked from the Arabian Nights,
Babylonian pomp, bells, lights,
trumpets, rumbling wheels, yoked oxen,
voices of pianos from parlors,
profound and piercing human moans,
children singing as one in class,
people hawking things in the street,
one tense fiber keeping the beat,
living in life’s most vital core
the way a heart goes on beating,
the way this crowd goes on breathing
in the chest of the city they adore.
This poem allows modern readers to see Dario’s views of minorities. It is indisputable that by our standards, his views are, to use the jargon of our own day, politically incorrect. His opinion of Jews, for instance, is troubling. While in a portion of “Canto a la Argentina” that is not included in this volume, he commands:
Sing Jews of the Pampa!
Young men of rude appearance,
sweet Rebeccas with honest eyes,
Reubens of long locks,
patriarchs of white
dense, horselike hair.
Sing, sing old Sarahs
and adolescent Benjamins
with the voice of our heart:
“We have found Zion!”,
in a poem called “Israel” his portrait of Jews rotates around their need to believe in Christ. Likewise, he approached blacks as inferior people. And while he idealized the pre-Columbian past, he never directly addressed the plight of the indigenous people contemporary to him. Still, within Nicaragua his relatively enlightened attitude was appreciated. Pablo Antonio Cuadra, arguably one of the most significant post- Rubenista poets in Nicaragua, who died in 2002, argued: “Darío was the first in the tradition of our literatura culta, the nation’s high-brow letters, not only to point to lo indio as a fountain of literary originality and authenticity but also to proclaim, against the complexes and prejudices of his age, mestizo pride.”
As a whole the issue of minorities in Darío is a controversial one and is in need of revaluation. Clearly, it is intimately linked in Latin America to questions of class. How did he view the difference between whiteness and brownness, between the Europeanized elite in Central America whose roots were in the Iberian Peninsula, and the rest of the population? What about immigration and the effort at the end of the nineteenth century by various governments on this side of the Atlantic to “recolonize” the provinces by opening the doors to Italian, German, and Jewish newcomers? Similarly, it is important to reassess Darío’s understanding of the duality between center and periphery, which I glanced at earlier on in this introduction. To what extent did his “colonial” mentality become the engine that made him conquer Spain by storm? And what is one to say about his approach to sex, death, and the human body in general? The reader of Darío’s prose in particular is likely to find an unsettling answer to this question.
In the end, though, what was the secret of Darío’s success? He himself answered the question thus: “My success—it would be absurd not to confess it—has been due to novelty. . . . And this novelty, what has it consisted of? A mental gallicism. When I read Groussac I did not know he was a Frenchman writing in Spanish. But he taught me to think in French ; after that, my young, happy heart claimed Gallic citizenship.” As World War I was raging, Darío published the first of three volumes of his selected poems, which he himself chose and organized. It appeared in Madrid under the auspices of Biblioteca Corona: Muy siglo XVIII (And Those that Come from the Eighteenth Century, 1914). Two other volumes followed, completing a trilogy in which Darío sought to reconfigure his work thematically. These were Muy antiguo y muy moderno (Some Both Ancient and Modern, 1915) and Y una sed de ilusiones infinita (And a Thirst for Illusive Hope That’s Endless, 1916). It was around the time of the third volume’s publication that Darío fell gravely ill
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