(Metapa, 1867 – León, 1916) great Nicaraguan poet pseudonym of Félix Rubén García Sarmiento, founder and chief representative of the Spanish American Modernism. His family was known by the surname of a grandparent, “the family of Darius, and the young poet in search of euphony, adopted the formula” Rubén Darío “as the name literary battle.

With a happy facility for rhythm and rhyme grew Rubén Darío turbulent disputes among family members, supervised by caring relatives and drawing with words in their hearts dreams exotic, memorable and storms sublime heroism. But at the time all this paraphernalia of prestigious topics began to wear romantic and offered to the imagination of poets and useless weapons that are kept in a portfolio of crumpled velvet. Rubén Darío was destined to revolutionize the Castilian verse rhythmically, but also to populate the world of new literary fantasies, unrealistic swans, celajes inevitable, kangaroos and Bengal tigers living together in the same landscape impossible.

Ruben was born almost by chance in a small town called Metapa Nicaragua, but a month of his birth came to reside in Leon, where his mother, Rosa Sarmiento, and his father, Manuel García, had founded a marriage of convenience but thriving theoretically only dislikes. To make things easier for mutual misunderstanding, the tireless Manuel immoderately indulged to the binges, drowning their sorrows in brothels, while poor Rosa fled from time to time your spouse to take refuge in the house of one of his relatives. Do not take it to give birth to a second daughter, Candida Rosa, who soon fell through, or in love with a guy named Juan Benito Soriano, who went to live to their first-dragging “a primitive house, poor and without bricks , in the field, located in the Honduran town of San Marcos Colón.

However, the small Rubén León soon returned and went to reside with his mother’s uncles, Bernarda Sarmiento and her husband, Colonel Felix Ramirez, who had recently lost a child and welcomed him as their real parents. Very now and then saw Ruben Rosa Sarmiento, who know, and more or less to Manuel, who always felt detached, so much so that the budding poet signed his first school work as Félix Rubén Ramírez.

During his early years he studied with the Jesuits, who dedicated a poem full of invective, referring to his “worm-eaten robes” and decried as “dragons”, but at that stage of youth not only cultivated the irony: As early as his poetry Becquer and influenced by Victor Hugo was his vocation to eternal love. As he himself confessed in the Autobiography, a teacher from the first letters imposed a severe punishment when caught him “in the company of a precocious little girl, starting ignorant and impossible Daphnis and Chloe, and according to Góngora’s verse, the rascalities behind the door “.

Before he was fifteen, when the designs of his heart were aimed overwhelmingly toward the slender green-eyed girl called Emelina Rosario Murillo, in the catalog of his passions had scored a “distant cousin, blonde, very beautiful”, perhaps Isabel Swan, and Hortensia Buislay trapeze. None of them, however, will seek as many headaches as Rosario, and as soon manifest the muse of his mediocre sentimental novel Emelina their desire to get married immediately, friends and relatives conspired to leave the city and end of growing without incurring unthinking precipitation.

In August 1882 he was in El Salvador, where he was received by President Zaldívar, on which scores flattered in his Autobiography: “The president was gentilísimo and told me about my poems and offered me his protection, but when I asked what is what I wanted, I said these exact words were unforgettable smile to the man of power: “I have a good social position.”

In this eloquent episode, Rubén openly expresses his bourgeois ambitions, which would still more painfully frustrated and because of which would suffer even more insidiously Chilean stage further. In Chile also met the President suicide Balmaceda and befriended his son, Pedro Balmaceda Toro, as well as the aristocratic inner circle of it, but to dress decently, secretly fed herrings and beer “, and their wealthy cronies are not hiding their miserable condition. Published in Chile, from October 1886, Abrojos, poems that they realize their sad state of poor, misunderstood poet, or even a fleeting love Domitila lived with such a dry get your pain.

For a literary competition organized by the millionaire Federico Varela writes Autumn, which gets a modest eighth among the forty-seven manuscripts submitted, and epic sing the glories of Chile, which is awarded the first prize, shared with Pedro Nolasco Préndez, and to report the modest sum of three hundred dollars.

But in 1888 when the real value of Rubén Darío is announced with the release of Blue, a book praised from Spain by the then famous novelist Juan Valera, whose importance as a bridge between Spanish and Latin American cultures has been brilliantly examined by Mary Beneyto. Juan Valera’s letters served as a prologue to the new expanded reissue of 1890, but by then had become the poet’s obsessive will to escape from those narrow intellectual circles, where there was not enough recognition as an artist or the desired prosperity economic, to finally meet the legendary Paris.

On June 21, 1890 Reuben married a woman with whom he shared literary tastes, Rafaela Contreras, but only a year later, on January 12, could complete the church ceremony, interrupted by a military coup. Later, celebrate the fourth anniversary of the discovery of America, was fulfilled his desire to see the Old World to be sent as ambassador to Spain.

The poet landed in La Coruna on August 1, 1892 preceded by a celebrity that allows you to establish immediate relationships with key political figures of Spanish literature, but unfortunately, their happiness is marred by the sudden death of his wife which occurred on January 23, 1893, which add fuel to the trend, always a little outrageous, to be pumped formidable dose of alcohol.

Just drunk was forced to marry soon after with that angelic girl who had been the object of his worship teen Emelina Rosario Murillo, who made him the victim of one of the most gruesome episodes of his life. Apparently, the brother of Rosario, a man without scruples, concocted the perverse plan, knowing that the girl was pregnant. In complicity with the girl, surprised the lovers in love honest trade, brandished a pistol, threatened to kill if Ruben marriage contracted immediately, hit the wretched whiskey, he called for a priest and audited the religious ceremony the same day 8 March 1893.

Portrait of Ruben Dario at age 28

Naturally, the trickster had to resign themselves to the facts, but did not consent to live with the deception, would spend much of his life haunted by his treacherous wife and abandoned. The truth is that better grip Ruben concluded in Madrid with a low-status woman, Francisca Sanchez, the maid illiterate Villaespesa the poet’s house, where he found refuge and sweetness. Her travel to Paris at the turn, having served as consul of Colombia in Buenos Aires and have resided there from 1893 to 1898, and after taking Madrid as his second home since he arrived, that last year the capital sent by the Spanish newspaper La Nacion.

Then began for him a period of travel enthusiasts Italy, England, Belgium, Barcelona, Mallorca … and is it then when you write your most valuable books: Songs of Life and Hope (1905), The Song Wandering (1907), The Poem of Autumn (1910), Gold de Mallorca (1913). But must travel to Mallorca to restore his deteriorating health, that neither the solicitous care of his good Francisca able to float. On the other hand, the boy who wanted to achieve “good status” did not get any more money and respectability enough to live with frugality and modesty, and is proof of this eloquent episode of 1908, related to the extravagant Spanish writer Alejandro Sawa, who many years earlier he had served in Paris as a guide to meet the perpetually drunken Verlaine.

Sawa, a poor bohemian, old, blind and sick, who had devoted his life to literature proud, complained to Ruben the small sum of four quarters to see finally published what is now considered his most valuable, in Illuminations shadow, but it apparently was not ready to give you this money and took the other way, so that Sawa, in his correspondence, he finally passed the pleas to the righteous indignation, demanding payment for services rendered. According to states now, he would have been the author or black, some slang editorial articles submitted in 1905 for The Nation and signed by Rubén Darío. In any case, it will finally Nicaraguan poet who, at the request of the widow of Alejandro Sawa, preface touched the strange posthumous book of the “grand bohemian” who “spoke in the book” and “was gracefully dramatic”, citing the words Ruben.

And at the end of his life, the author of Blue was not in a position to favor their friends than with his pen, the fruits in many cases even have enough to pay their debts, but won, yes, recognition of most contemporary writers in Spanish language and the gratitude of all who must, after him, have tried to write an Alexandrian in this language. In 1916, shortly after returning to his native Nicaragua, Rubén Darío died, and the news brought sadness to the intellectual community who speak Spanish.

The work of Rubén Darío

His poetry, as beautiful as cultured, musical and sound, influenced hundreds of writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Darius was one of the great innovators of poetic language in Spanish literature. The basic elements of his poetry may be found in the prefaces to Prose secular songs of life and hope and the wandering song. Among them is essential to search for beauty that Ruben is hidden in reality. For Ruben, the poet’s mission is to make available to other men ineffable side of reality. To discover this side ineffable, the poet has the metaphor and symbol as main tools. Directly related to this is the rejection of the realist aesthetic escapism and fantasy scenarios, spatially and temporally remote from their reality.

Quite restless and dissatisfied, greedy of pleasure and life, pain and anguish to the idea of death, Darius happens frequently to the narrowness of waste, optimism to pessimism frantic desperation between drugs, women and alcohol, as if looking at life the same sense of originality in poetry or as if trying to stunned in his glory admonitor not consider the merits of his conscience. This “pagan love of life and Christian for fear of death” is a great lyric naive guess its significance and wants to break the siege of Spain and Latin traditional, and most importantly, get it. We need to break the monotonous solemnity of Spain with literary echoes of Victor Hugo’s romantic impetus, with the trappings of the Parnassians, with the “esprit” of Verlaine, Articles of The Rare (1896), subjects predominantly French, they speak clearly this path.