Translated from Spanish by Adam Feinstein. Bilingual edition.
Published 2020. Paperback, 154pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848617131 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Rubén Darío (1867–1916), the Nicaraguan poet and founder of the literary movement known as modernismo – somewhat akin to French symbolisme – died more than a century ago, but his influence on Spanish-language poetry remains immense. Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, César Vallejo, Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, among many others, acknowledged their debt. Borges declared: ‘Darío was an innovator in everything: subject matter, vocabulary, metre, the peculiar magic of certain words …We can truly call him the Liberator.’

He was born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento in 1867, near San Pedro de Metapa, about 90 kms from Managua, but moved as a child to the city of León, where he came early to writing, both poetry and journalism, before relocating at the age of 14 to Managua, and then El Salvador, where he was to find sponsors and helpful influences. By 1886, he had moved on again, this time to Chile – at that point something of a magnet for intellectuals from the rest of Latin America because of its political stability – where he worked as a journalist, but suffered from class-based prejudice from the upper echelons of Chilean society. Nonetheless his first books were published there, including Azul (‘Blue’, 1888), which had an enormous impact, kickstarting modernismo , and making the poet’s name. Thereafter he would continue to relocate frequently: Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, before the Nicaraguan government included him in a delegation to Spain, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Subsequent journeys took him to France, where he served as Nicaraguan consul, to Brazil, and then back to Madrid where he served as Ambassador. Financial problems and a chaotic love life bedevilled him throughout his life, and he died at 49 of cirrhosis of the liver.
Darío’s influence on Hispanic poetry is enormous: he is the conduit into Spanish for the most forward-looking kind of French poetry of his time, his own major influences including Hugo and Verlaine, and his relentless exploration of new metrical possibilities opened up fresh options for what was an ossified tradition at the time he erupted onto the scene.

Adam Feinstein’s translations maintain the musicality of Darío’s verse by preserving the original rhyme schemes. This is the first collection of Darío’s poetry in English to attempt such a feat.

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