Rubén Darío

Rubén Darío

Monument to Rubén Darío in Palma

Rubén Darío (actually Félix Rubén García y Sarmiento; born January 18, 1867 in Metapa , † February 6, 1916 in León ) was a Nicaraguan writer and diplomat .

Rubén Darío was a son of a middle-class Creole family . He took his stage name in honor of ancestors who were called Los Daríos . His hometown Metapa was renamed Ciudad Darío in his honor . Darío was married to Rafaela Contreras, with whom he fathered a son, and after her untimely death in 1893 to Rosario Murillo. He had three more children with his future lover Francisca Sánchez.

Life

Rubén was the first child of Manuel García and Rosa Sarmiento, who married on April 26, 1866 in León. For that they needed a papal dispensation since they were cousins. His parents' marriage was broken even before he was born, as his father was too addicted to alcohol and prostitutes. The pregnant woman went to Metapa, where she gave birth to her son. First she took him to León (Nicaragua) . However, when she moved to Honduras with her lover , she left him with her aunt Bernarda Sarmiento and her husband, Coronel Félix Ramírez Madregil, so that Rubén grew up with great-aunt and great-uncle. He attended various schools in León, including a Jesuit high school (1879 and 1880). According to his own statements, he learned to read at the age of three and was considered a poet prodigy ( poeta niño ) at an early age . There are anecdotes that he wrote his first poems at the age of 6; a sonnet written in 1879 has survived , and when he was 13 years old his elegy Una lágrima was published in the El Termómetro newspaper. During this time he was mainly influenced by the Spanish poets José Zorrilla y Moral , Ramón de Campoamor , Gaspar Núñez de Arce and Ventura de la Vega . Later he would be interested in the work of Victor Hugo and Juan Montalvo .

He left his homeland in the 1880s. First he went to El Salvador in 1882 , where he made his first acquaintance with local great poets. The then president, Rafael Zaldívar , sponsored him; nevertheless he suffered from economic difficulties. After contracting smallpox , he returned to Nicaragua in 1883, still convalescent . His first book, Epístolas y poemas , was printed in 1885 , but was not delivered until three years later.

In 1886 he went to Chile and worked as a freelancer for various newspapers, including La Época , El Heraldo and La Nación . He won the president's son, the poet Pedro Balmaceda Toro, as a friend and came into contact with the upper class. In 1887 he published his volume of poems Abrojos and a year later Azul , with which he was to open the new literary movement of Modernismo .

Rubén Darío

In 1889 he returned to Central America and married Rafaela Contreras on June 21, 1890 in San Salvador. The next day there was a coup d'état against the incumbent president, so Rubén Darío preferred to flee to Guatemala while his newlyweds remained in El Salvador. In 1890 the second, expanded edition of Azul appeared with two letters by the famous Spanish writer Juan Valera as a foreword.

In January, Rafaela was also able to follow; together they moved to Costa Rica , where their first son, Rubén Darío Contreras, was born on November 12, 1891. On the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America, the Nicaraguan government appointed Rubén Darío as a member of an official delegation to represent the country at the celebrations in Spain . During the crossing he made a stopover in Havana , where he met the poet Julián del Casal . In Spain himself he was associated with numerous intellectuals and writers, such as Emilia Pardo Bazán , Juan Valera, José Zorrilla, Gaspar Núñez de Arce, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and Salvador Rueda .

Soon after returning to Nicaragua, he received news of the serious illness of his wife Rafaela, who died on January 23, 1893. Rubén Darío soon married Rosario Murillo. In April of the same year he was appointed Honorary Consul in Buenos Aires by Colombian President Miguel Antonio Caro . Before he took up his post, he traveled to New York , where he met the Cuban poet José Martí , and to Paris , where he had a rather disappointing encounter with Paul Verlaine , whom he admired so much . On August 13, 1893, he came to Buenos Aires; his wife, who remained in Nicaragua, gave birth to a son, Darío Darío, on December 26th of the same year, who died of tetanus at the age of a few weeks .

In Buenos Aires Rubén Darío frequented intellectual circles and was a correspondent for various newspapers such as La Prensa , La Tribuna and El Tiempo . On May 3, 1895, his mother Rosa Sarmiento died, whom he had hardly known, but whose death was a severe blow to him. In October of the same year, the Colombian government left the honorary consulate in Buenos Aires, as there were hardly any Colombians in Argentina; the poet then hired himself as secretary to the director general of the Argentine post office.

Two of his most important books were published in Buenos Aires in 1896: Los raros , a collection of articles on various writers, and Prosas profanas y otros poemas , probably his most popular book in the Spanish-speaking world to this day.

After Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American War , Darío was posted as a correspondent for the La Nación newspaper in 1898 and arrived in Barcelona on December 22nd . From there he sent his employer four chronicles per month, the 1901 under the title España Contemporánea. Crónicas y retratos literarios were also published in book form. He made contact with a number of young poets such as Juan Ramón Jiménez , Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and Jacinto Benavente , for whom he was a great role model. In 1899 he met Francisca Sánchez del Pozo, an illiterate farmer who was to become his partner for the last few years. From 1900 to 1908 they settled in Paris , the city of his childhood dreams . His chronicles of the World's Fair were later summarized in the Book of Peregrinaciones . In 1901 Francisca gave birth to a daughter, Carmen Darío Sánchez, who died of smallpox a little later before the father saw her.

In 1902 Rubén Darío met the young Spanish poet Antonio Machado . In 1903 he was appointed consul of Nicaragua; in April of the same year his second son, Rubén Darío Sánchez, was born. During these years the poet made numerous trips through Europe, including England , Belgium , Germany and Italy . In 1905 he went on an official mission to Spain, where his third major poetic work was published, Cantos de vida y esperanza . In the same year his son died of pneumonia . In 1906 he took part in the Pan-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro , after which he returned to Paris and spent the winter of 1907 with Francisca Sánchez in Mallorca ; a daughter born there died at birth. At this time the poet made an attempt to divorce his wife Rosario Murillo; but in view of their high demands for compensation, no agreement was reached.

Due to his high alcohol consumption, Rubén Darío became seriously ill. Towards the end of the year, their fourth child was born with Francisca, Rubén Darío Sánchez, the couple's only surviving son.

Darios grave

After brief stops in New York and Panama, the poet returned to Nicaragua, where he was given a triumphant welcome. From 1908 to 1910 he worked as the Nicaraguan ambassador in Madrid , but ended this activity because of his alcoholic illness . As a result, his health deteriorated noticeably. In 1910 he traveled to Mexico as a member of a Nicaraguan delegation to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Mexican independence, but then President Porfirio Díaz refused to see the writer while the common people cheered him enthusiastically. Under the influence of his drinking problems, Rubén Darío attempted suicide on the onward journey in Havana . In 1912 the poet went on a tour of Latin America, with stops in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo , Montevideo and Buenos Aires. During this time he also wrote his autobiography , which was published under the title La vida de Rubén Darío escrita por él mismo (Life of Rubén Darío, written by himself) in the magazine Caras y Caretas . He also wrote a Historia de mis libros (history of my books). The following year in Mallorca he began to write a short story, El oro de Mallorca , interspersed with autobiographical allusions. In 1914 he had the book Canto a la Argentina y otros poemas printed in Barcelona .

When the First World War broke out , Rubén Darío traveled to America to campaign for the pacifist idea, with stops in New York and Guatemala. In 1914 he returned to Nicaragua in anticipation of his death. He died on February 6, 1916 of severe pneumonia in León.

The asteroid (9482) Rubéndarío was named after him in 1999.

plant

Darío is considered to be the founder of modernism in Latin America . His work was mainly influenced by the symbolist poets Paul Verlaine and Jean Moréas , but also by Victor Hugo . He was one of the first Central American writers to write in Spanish, giving the Central American people a voice.

His first work Azul… (1888, modified editions 1890 and 1905; Ger .: Azur ) secured him the recognition of contemporary criticism, he achieved world fame posthumously with his poetry volume Prosas Profanas (1896; Ger .: Profane poems ) and Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905; German: songs of life and hope ). During his lifetime, however, he did not get the attention he wanted, especially in Paris and Europe.

literature

• Julio Chiappini: Rubén Darío. Biography . Editorial Fas, Rosario 2012.

Web links

Commons : Rubén Darío  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ruben Dario in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin
• Literature by and about Rubén Darío in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Rubén Darío in the catalog of the library of the Instituto Cervantes in Germany
• Some poems a.o. by Darío, translated by Martin von Arndt

notes

1. ↑ in German: RD, Das Gold Mallorcas. Stories. (The eponymous story.) Translated by Ulrich Kunzmann. RUB , 1018. Reclam, Leipzig 1983, pp. 5-48. In chap. 4, pp. 37–40: Comments on the Xuetas or "Chuetas".
2. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 34354