Rubén Darío and Modernism on the Global Scale

Oscar Ortega

GSI Matthew Gonzales (Friday 2 - 3)

Comparative Literature 60 AC

3 November 2016

On the 18th of January during the year 1867, a boy known as Rubén García Sarmiento was born in the small town of Metapa, Nicaragua. Better known as Rubén Darío, this influential poet, journalist, and diplomat became known as the undisputed leader in the Spanish-American movement known as Modernismo (Modernism) which flourished in the tail-end of the 19th century and early 20th century. Through his poetry, he revived Spanish poetry both in Europe and the Americas through his experimentations with style. From the the age of fourteen he began to make a name for himself through his stories and poems which would reveal his vivid imagination and by the year 1886 (he was 19 at the time) he began his travels that he would continue for the remainder of his life.

In the year 1888 he published his first of many major works Azul ("Blue) which was a collection of short stories, and verse and his quite rapidly became known in both Europe and Latin America as the hallmark of a new era in Spanish American literature. For example, in Azul, he began to discard the traditionally long and complex grammatical structures of the Spanish language, instead replacing it with simple language that was symbolic in nature.  Rubén Darío's use of enjambment and the mid-line caesura in his writing were considered very especially innovative at the time (even considered avant-garde). In this work in particular he also deviated from the  romanticist movement which placed more importance in the beauty of everyday life, instead focusing on "creating art for arts sake".

It is interesting to note that the earliest known appearance in print of the term  "modernism "  was coined in  Darío's essay "La literatura en Centroámerica¨" in which he discussed how a contemporary author was then using "el absoluto modernismo en la expressión ("absolute modernism in expression"). So even though the definition of modernism began to debated in English speaking cultures at around the 1950´s, the term has been coined in the Spanish-speaking world beginning in the nineteenth century.

Like the modernist movement in the United States, the Latin American Modernist movement also explored many of the ideas that have been shown in this course. The Latin American modernist movement took a focus on the exploration of loneliness, sensuality, love, and eroticism, (all of which were considered to be avant-garde topics in Latin American culture) but an emphasis was also placed on the defence of indigenism and Spanish culture. Here is an excerpt of a poem written by the poet in response to the United States's intervention in Panama's independance movement from Colombia (one of the actions of Teddy Roosevelt's "Big Stick" foreign policy).  

To Roosevelt - Poem by Ruben Dario

It is with the voice of the Bible, or verse of Walt Whitman,

that we should reach you, Hunter!

Primitive and modern, simple and complicated,

with a bit of Washington and a bit of Nimrod.

You are the United States,

You are the future invader

the naive America who has Indian blood,

that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks Spanish.

You are a proud and strong exemplar of your race;

you are cultured, you are clever, you oppose Tolstoy.

And breaking horses, or murdering tigers,

you are an Alejandro Nebuchadnezzar.

(You're a professor of energy,

as today's madmen say.)

You think life is fire,

that progress is eruption;

where you put your bullet

you put the future.

No.

The United States is strong and big.

When it shakes there is a deep tremor

through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.

If you clamor, you hear the roar of the lion.

Hugo said to Grant: "The stars are yours."

(Just shining, rising, Argentine sun

and the Chilean star rises ...) You're rich.

Join Hercules' cult to Mammon's;

and lighting the path to easy conquest,

Liberty raises her torch in New York.

But our America, which had poets

from the old days of Netzahualcoyotl,

you have saved in the footsteps of the great feet of Bacchus

panic in the alphabet learned a while;

who consulted the stars, that knew Atlantis,

whose name comes to resonate in Plato

Since the ancient times of your life

living light, fire, perfume, love,

America's great Montezuma, from the Inca,

redolent of America by Christopher Columbus

Catholic American, Spanish American,

The America where noble Cuahtemoc said:

"I'm not a bed of roses" that America

trembles in hurricanes and lives in Love,

men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul lives.

And dreams. And loves, and vibrates, and is the daughter of the Sun

Be careful. Live the American Spanish!

There are thousand of puppies loose Leon Spanish.

Be required, Roosevelt, being God himself,

Rifleman the terrible and strong Hunter,

order to keep us in your tight grip.

And, You may count it all, missing one thing: God!

Growing up as a Nicaraguan American, I found it particularly fascinating to learn about the similarities and differences between the North American modernist movements and the ones that took place in Latin America and the rest of the world. So , It was interesting to delve into how cultures around the world began to explore and have their  Modernist movements, each of them with their own emphasis.

Discussion Questions:

1: How have the different modernist movements that occurred in the Americas and Europe influenced one another?

2: What ideas  do the United States's modernist movement seem to be most concerned about? What about the author's of the novels we have read so far?

Work Cited

“Latin American modernism: Rubén Darío.” donquixote.. donQuijote, 12 July 2013. Web. 4 Nov.

        2016

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. “Ruben Dario | Nicaraguan Writer.” Encyclopædia Britannica. N.p.: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2016. Web. 4 Nov. 2016.

Chinedu, Dike. “To Roosevelt poem by Ruben Dario.” PoemHunter. PoemHunter, 19 June 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2016.