Read Online Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) by Rubén Darío - Free Book Online

past. He does not reimagine Darío’s fiction and nonfiction using present-day colloquialisms. Instead, he makes use of the English of the time to place the Nicaraguan in a period to which he belongs in chronological terms. Hurley states that “Just as in Spanish Darío reminds one of the English and French writers that were pursuing similar themes and aesthetic concerns at the same time as he (because he was, in fact, ‘translating’ them), so I have wanted Darío, in English, to sit firmly in that tradition. Thus, a ‘timeless’ yet identifiably fin-de-siècle language and style seemed called for, and I simply ‘back-translated’ Darío into a tradition the English reader is already perfectly familiar with.”
    This double strategy might be disruptive to some, resulting in a composite picture of Darío that is schizophrenic. But the opposite is true. The Rubén Darío showcased in this anthology is a man for all seasons. It is our duty to appreciate him in full in each and every one of them. After all, he was a polymath, a sum of parts. Why simplify him? Shouldn’t each of those parts command our attention? Neither of the translating methods used in these pages is better than the other. They are mere stratagems, for the translator is also an artist, and an approach to the work depends on an understanding of the world. The same question of approach, I might add, might be faced by a novelist today whose task it is to locate his plot in Dickens’s London: should he recreate the past in content only, making use of the jargon we employ nowadays? Or might it be better to deliver the storyline as if the author of David Copperfield had written it himself? As long as each of the approaches is embraced not only thoroughly but convincingly, their worth is indisputable and that, I’m happy to report, is the case in this Penguin Classic volume. I would go as far as to argue that the approach taken for the two parts is precisely the one required. Darío’s poetry tends toward the hermetic. Why eclipse his esoteric views even more by presenting them in a language that is alien to readers today? Why make his poetic remoteness even more isolated? Conversely, his stories, legends and journalism were often written on deadline, are originally meant for a wider readership. This, it strikes me, is reason enough to use them as a springboard to understand Darío’s frame of mind as well as the type of language he used and the age in which he lived.
    Translation was a topic that concerned Darío dearly, just as it concerned other giants of Latin American poetry: Borges, Neruda, Vallejo, Paz . . . The Nicaraguan believed that in order to translate a work of poetry, one must be a poet. But Darío did not so much engage in the act and art of translation as read translations devotedly and enthusiastically. Upon reading the J. D. Mardrus rendition of the 1001 Nights, he commented: “Of myself, I will say that no book has so liberated my spirit from the wearinesses of our common existence, our daily aches and pains, as this book of pearls and gems, magic spells and enchantments, realities so ungraspable and fantasies so real. Its fragrance is sedative, its effluvia calming, its delights refreshing and comforting. Like any modifier of thought, but without the inconveniences of venoms, alcohols, or alkaloids, it offers the gift of an artificial paradise. To read certain tales is to enter a pool of warm rosewater. And in all, there is delight for the five senses—and for others that we hardly suspect.” Obviously the Rubén Darío encountered in the following pages is, inevitably, a reinvented one, a poet remapped in a language not his own. But in my view the collaborative effort is brilliant. It should allow the uninitiated to appreciate the pearls and gems, magic spells and enchantments, as well as the emblematic aesthetic viewpoint this superb homme de lettres left for us. His “artificial paradise” is more than worth exploring, for