By Oscar Arias Sánchez*
On various occasions I have said that if politics is my profession, art is my true passion. Within that wonderful region of beauty, poetry has occupied a preponderant place in my life.
Rubén Darío was my Virgil, my Baquian in this exploration of literary beauty. From his hand I climbed the shovels that led me towards poetic plenitude. He was my initiator, my lazarillo through that portentous linguistic adventure that is poetry. The music of words, the assortment of sonorities, the hypnosis of litanies.
My father opened that wide pathway that on Dario’s back allowed me access to the sacred mystery of poetry. He would declaim Dario’s most famous poems…. At this moment I hear his musical voice, rhythmic, cadenza and somewhat melancholic. To my father I owe the first contact with Rubén Darío. This is one more reason to venerate his memory for the rest of my days.
From a young age I became familiar with the biography that the illustrious Nicaraguan intellectual and pedagogue Edelberto Torres (1898-1994) elaborated around the figure of Darío. He too was an initiator in the Darian cult, and for this I hold him in deep gratitude. (It is important not to confuse him with his son, Edelberto Torres Rivas, an eminent Guatemalan sociologist).
The book is entitled The Dramatic Life of Rubén Darío. Never better said: Darío was one of the cursed poets par excellence in the history of literature, alongside Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valle-Inclán, García Lorca and Miguel Hernández.
He was one of those ‘albatrosses’ that reigned supreme among the clouds and the infinite sky of the seas, but that while walking on earth seem clumsy, misfit, dragging their huge wings made for the heights, like the oars of an abandoned ship.
Dramatic life
That was Dario’s living space: the firmament. It is unspeakably tragic that, in what constitutes one of the cruellest ironies in literary history, he also knew the pipes, the sordid taverns, the sinister suburbs where alcohol flowed prodigiously like a river of muddy water.
Dario knew both ecstasy and agony, the rarefied air of the peaks as well as the searing climate of misery and degradation. Edelberto Torres certainly chooses the best adjective to describe his life: ‘dramatic’.
When I entered the University of Costa Rica, I took a course in Science and Letters with the distinguished Costa Rican intellectual and diplomat Don Enrique Macaya Lahmann: I see and hear him reciting Dario’s verses and I still shudder.
He was a great teacher. Years later, when I was in my third year of law school, I wanted to give a lecture on the poet in our faculty. I remember my classmates Sonia Picado and Álvaro Lara telling me: ‘We are in a law school. Nobody is interested in knowing Rubén Darío. In the end, I gave my lecture with the faculty auditorium full of students and professors.
Dario’s poetry has accompanied me throughout my life. His verses have walked with me, making my life fuller and more bearable. Countless times I have quoted the ‘Litany of our Lord Don Quixote’, where the bard harmonises the tone of a prayer with the anguished rhythm of a desperate rogatory full of pessimism.
The poem belongs to the book Songs of Life and Hope, which – new irony – contains some of the darkest and most hopeless verses to ever come out of his blessed pen. In my youth, I memorised the ‘Sonatina’, the ‘Triumphal March’ and ‘The Fatal’, which strips away an absolutely oppressive view of life: sensitivity would be the worst of curses for human beings, to a point that would make us envy the rigid and cold unconsciousness of stones.
A phenomenon of hybridity
‘Divine Indian, tamer of words’ – Ortega y Gasset said of Rubén Darío. This is high praise coming from a philosopher who distinguished himself for the elegance, the exquisite precision of his prose.
‘More a collector of metaphors than a true philosopher’ – rumoured the mean spirits behind this great thinker. The curious thing is that in both Darío and Ortega y Gasset we find the same phenomenon of hybridity: they are as much poets as philosophers, as much philosophers as poets.
The same can be said of Machado, Unamuno, León Felipe and Paul Valéry: all of them represent that point of perfect balance, of mutual fertilisation where poetry – the beautiful saying – and philosophy – the true saying – converge and shake hands. Does not ‘The Fatal’ leave a disturbing testimony of a philosophy of life, of a conception of the world, of the human being and his place in the cosmos? I already think so: ‘The Fatal’ contains an entire Weltanschauung, i.e. an implicit worldview.
Rubén Darío has comforted me in times of doubt and uncertainty and given me hope in times of discouragement and love in all times of my life. When I think of him my heart opens in a burst of gratitude: the only thing I would like is to be able to thank him personally because he has always been the ally of my struggles and dreams.
It is with absolute accuracy that I can say today: my life without Rubén Darío would have been radically different. A much more arid and inhospitable existence. I know that literary theorists have declared him the official banner of modernism, but these considerations are of little importance to me.
In the art world, nothing and no one suddenly emerges from a bell of emptiness. Darío was spawned by Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Espronceda, Zorrilla, Núñez de Arce, Campoamor and Bécquer. Dario invented an entire century of poetry. After him, anyone who dared venture into the andurrials of lyric poetry had to pay a toll and pay more or less a manifest tribute to this brilliant troubadour.
His connection with Costa Rica was endearing. As we know, his first wife, Rafaela Contreras Cañas (who signed her stories with the pseudonym Stella), was Costa Rican. This talented and charming woman barely came to say hello to life, and as soon as she opened up to the light, death dumped her at the age of 23. Costa Rica still owes her a serious biographical essay, the critical edition of her short but significant work, and the specialised academic attention it undoubtedly deserves.
Rubén Darío, pilgrim of a thousand roads, tried his luck in Costa Rica and left a deep and indelible imprint on our country. This singular man had so much genius that he even managed to make himself the most beautiful literary name: Rubén Darío. A whole poem! A beautiful name is a mere coincidence, but a beautiful pseudonym is proof of infinite talent, as in the case of Pablo Neruda, Stendhal, Gabriela Mistral, Jorge Debravo, Ana Istarú, names full of magic.
Rubén Darío is the prophetic word, the visionary verb, the discoverer of a whole continent of beauty that the world had never dreamed of. And who were his muses, his literary heroes? The poet points out to us in his prologue to Prosas profanas: ‘The Spanish grandfather with the white beard points out to me a series of illustrious portraits: “This,” he tells me, “is the great Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, genius and maniac; this is Lope de Vega, this Garcilaso, this Quintana”. I ask him about the noble Gracián, Teresa la Santa, the good Góngora and the strongest of them all, don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Then he exclaimed: Shakespeare! Dante! Hugo! (and, inside me, Verlaine!).
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*The author was president of Costa Rica on two occasions (1986-1990 and 2006-2010) and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987.