ELEVEN POEMS OF RUBEN DARIO

PUBLICATIONS OF

THE HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA No. 105

ELEVEN POEMS OF

RUBEN DARIO TRANSLATIONS BY

THOMAS WALSH AND SALOMON DE LA SELVA INTRODUCTION BY

PEDRO HENRIQUEZ URENA

P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON

G.

1916

Copyright, 191 6, by

The Hispanic Society of America

I'

Contents Page

Introduction

v

Primaveral

3

(Primaveral)

^Autumnal

7

(Autumnal)

^Portico

13

(Portico)

The Three Wise Kings

23

(Los Tres Reyes Magos)

^ong of Hope

25

(Canto de Esperanza)

^ Poets! (j

A

Towers

of

God

29

Torres de Dios! Poetas!)

Sonnet on Cervantes

31

(Soneto a Cervantes)

On

the

(En

i"3

la

Death

of a Poet

Muerte de un Poeta)

33

Page

Antonio Machado

35

(Oracion por Antonio Machado)

Bagpipes of Spain

37

(Galta Galaica)

^Song of Autumn

in the

Springtime

....

39

(Canclon de Otono en Prima vera)

Bibliography

45

Criticisms

47

Civ

Introduction

XT 7ITH *

'

Ruben Dario,

the death of

language loses

its

the Spanish

greatest poet of to-day,

— the

greatest because of the aesthetic value and the historical

significance

No

of his work.

one,

since the

Gongora and Quevedo, has wielded an

influ-

ence comparable, in renewing power, to Dario's.

Zo-

times of

was enormous, but not true innovation: when it spread, the

rrilla's influence, for instance,

in the sense of a

romantic movement he represented was already the

dominant force more,

in

in style as

well as in the spirit

Dario's victory was not without surprising

of poetry.

elements,

Dario did much

our literature.

prosody and

in

— especially because, born in the New World,

was unreservedly acclaimed by

he

our

former

groups

of

homage

of the Spanish writers to

sincere.

metropolis,

the

intellectual

The

Madrid.

Dario was great and

Even Royal Academicians,

in

spite

of

the

timidity natural in traditional institutions, paid signal tribute to his genius.

Upon

the

news of

his death, the

writers and artists of Spain, headed by Valle-Inclan (the greatest literary force in the present generation),

organized a movement to erect a

memory

in the royal

monument

to

his

gardens of the Buen Retiro.

Dario began, when very young, writing quite within

He was

the traditions of our language and literature.

ya

reader of both the classics and the moderns, and

essayed such widely different tones

as

those corre-

sponding to the solemnity of the blank verse fluency of the romance.

Soon

and to the

after, he took up the

study of the modern French and, .partly, the English literatures

;

and

his poetry, in

Azul, began to show the

marvellous variety of shading and the preciosity,, of

workmanship which were to be his distinctive traits jn His most important achievement Prosas profanas.

was

A

There

the book of Cantos de vida y esperanza.

he attained (especially in the autobiographical Port

tico) a

depth of

human

feeling a nd a sonorous splendor

\ of utterance which placed him

amon g

S of first rank in a ny languag e.

His

but

rise to that magnificence,

always

the

later it

modern

work

poets

did not

often took a

bold, rough-hewrij sort of Rodinesque form,

which has

found many admirers.

As

He

is

Ruben Dario

a prosodist,

the poet

of verse forms. centuries,

unique in Spanish.

is

who has mastered the greatest variety The Spanish poets of the last four

whether

in

Europe or

in

America, although

they tried several measures, succeeded only in a few.

Like the Italians before Carducci, they had command only over the hendecasyllabic, octosyllabic and heptasyllabic

forms.

A

few meters, besides these

have at times enjoyed popularity,

as,

three,

for instance, the

alexandrine during the romantic period; but they suffered from stiffness of accentuation. {

;

modernist

through

which sprang

groups

his stimulus,

Dario, and the

into

action

mainly

gave vogue, and

finally

perma-

Nnence, to a large number of metrical forms: either verses

rarely

used,

li

ke

the

enneas yjlabic

and the

dodecasyllabic^ (of which there are three types), or

ve rses,

the

like

alexandrine,

to

which Dario gav e

greater musical virtue by freeing the accent and the caesura.

Even the hendecasyllable acquired new

flexi-

when Dario brought back two new forms

bility

of

that_ had been used by Spanish poets during three centuries but had been forgotten since

accentuation

about 1800.

He

also

attacked the problem of the

hexameter, which has tempted many great modern poets, from Goethe to Swinburne and Carducci,

classic

and, before these, a

few of the Spanish

century, chiefly Villegas.

\

He

in the

XVIIth

introduced, finally, the

£12^^J™ J!£!i_^i4ii.^' the type in which the number of feet, but not the foot, c hange^ (as in the Marcha triunfal), as well as the type in

which

bpth^^t^

ber of syllables and the foot vary freq^uently.

In

He

style,

Ruben Dario represents another renewal.

not only fled from the hackneyed, from expressions

which, like coins, were natural

worn out by

outcome of every new

use:

artistic

or

it

is

the

literary

tendency to do away with the useless remains of forvii]

mer

X

He

styles.

much more;

did

together with a few

Manuel Gutierrez Najera

like

others,

Qario brought back

of

Mexico,

into Spanish tli£-art^oi.aj,^gjLpe, of

delicate shading, in poetical styl e.

This

but

all

art,

absent from Spanish poetry during two centuries, had

been substituted by the forceful drawin&.„and vivid coloring which foreigners ex£ect to find in

all

things

Spanish.

In the

spirit of poetry,

Ruben Dario succeeded

giving "des frissons nouveaux."

was one

of the first

If not the first,

in

he

(simultaneously with Gutierrez

Najera, with Julian del Casal, of Cuba, and Jose

Asuncion

of Colombia)

Silva,

to bring into

Spanish

was

the notes of subtle emotion of which Verlaine

master th e gracefulness and the brilliancy which \jirch / emerge from the world of Versaillesque courts and ;

\

feigned Arcadies; the decorative sense of a merely ex-

\ ternal

/ I

Helleaism, which

is

delightful in itslrant ar-

the suggestions of exotic worlds, opulent

tificiality;

storehguses of imaginative treasures.

But, while he did

all this,

ioTce: he was, and he

he never lost his n ative

knew how

Spanish-American, rather.

He

— the

to be,

Amcricanj

sang of his race, of

whole Spanish-speaking^fa^^ tionst— with constant love, with a te ndern e ss whic h his people,

times that

was almost

life in

the

childlike.

—

at

If he did not always think

New World was

poetical, he did think [[

viii

that the^dealsof^ Spanish

America were worthy oi

And, as he upheld the

his poetry.

ideals of Spanish

America, and the traditions of the whole Spanish race since he sang

mother country, and to the master

spirits of the

new

Mitre of Argentina, both Spain and

like

countries,

;

to the Cid, founder of the old

hymns

Spanish America saw in him their representative poet. *

*

*

Ruben Dario was born near Leon, Nicaragua, the

in the

that city on the 6th of February, 1916. his education there, but

year.

He

Republic of

1867, and died

i8th of January,

went abroad

He

in

received

in his twentieth

visited nearly all the countries of the

West-

ern Hemisphere and travelled extensively in Europe

He

since 1892.

lived

many

years at Santiago de Chile,

Buenos Aires, Madrid and Paris. at

At Madrid he was

one time the Minister of Nicaragua.

He

visited

the United States, in a short trip,

in

1893, and again during the winter of 1914 and 1915.

He was then honored by several literary bodies of New York, such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Authors' League. Society of

Many and

of his poems, and

articles,

Italian,

The

Hispanic

its

honorary medal.

some of

his short stories

have been translated into English, French,

Portuguese,

languages.

«3

America awarded him

German and

the

Scandinavian

r-f'

y

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