A Review of Divino e infame. Las identidades de Rubén Darío
Fresh insight into seemingly exhausted topics often comes from unexpected places. Luís Cláudio Villafañe’s biographical account of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916), one of Latin America’s most influential and well-known artists, may serve as an illuminating case in point.
Instead of enlarging the already incommensurable literature on the subject with a specialized monograph or yet another mythologizing account, Villafañe chose to gather, digest and put in order all the existing material on the so-called “Prince of Spanish Letters” and produce a concise, much-needed retelling of his extraordinary life and times. This, in itself, is no small feat: while academic insight on the poet continues to grow apace, the most authoritative biography to date, Edelberto Torres Espinoza’s 1952 La dramática vida de Rubén Darío, has undergone eight successive editions and currently surpasses the 800 pages in length. The Nicaraguan’s life story, in short, had become a monstrous, barely legible tale, and so a synthetizing effort seems more urgent than ever.
Divino e infame. Las identidades de Rubén Darío by Luís Cláudio Villafañe G. Santos (Taurus, 2023, 371 pages)
Villafañe’s Divino e infame. Las identidades de Rubén Darío offers exactly that, and much more. A Brazilian diplomat and historian, his “fortuitous” encounter with Darío was made possible by his appointment as ambassador to Nicaragua in 2017. For Villafañe, the experience was nothing short of transformative: apart from discovering Darío’s true stature as a groundbreaking modern artist, responsible for revolutionizing the Spanish language, he was surprised to learn that the poet had visited Brazil not only once, but twice in his lifetime. Such an unanticipated revelation prompted Yo Pan-Americanicé: Rubén Darío en Brasil (2018), in which Villafañe explored a sort of bygone, inverted mirror-image of himself: that of a Nicaraguan arriving in the recently post-imperial republic of the United States of Brazil, first in 1906, afterwards in 1912.
This is, precisely, the sort of playful foreign gaze that pervades Divino e infame. Written by someone who did not grow under the blinding halo of Darío’s mythos, the book not only manages to bridge the Portuguese-Spanish divide, still prevalent in Latin America, but also to complicate further what has been, perhaps, a too unidimensional image of the poet.
The first chapter excepted, the book adheres to a strict chronological order. Yet more than a shortcoming, this straightforward structure manages to illuminate what a thematic arrangement cannot: the unpredictable, chaotic, day-to-day unfolding of a life, in itself devoid of any ultimate meaning. And if this is true of any human existence, it is definitely more so with respect to Darío’s, which was particularly restless. From 1867, when he was born in Metapa, Nicaragua, to his premature passing in 1916, at the young age of 49, the poet had few moments of sedentary rest: besides living at one time or another in El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Spain and France, he traveled widely across America and Europe.
Far from avoiding the constant interruptions that such a transatlantic, nomad existence can inflict on any semblance of narrative flow, Villafañe seems to revel in its haphazardness, emphasizing Darío’s cosmopolitanism, his globetrotting uprootedness. His life, his many lives, cannot be circumscribed to a single nation, not even to a single continent ¾in this sense, a chronological table and a name index would have been a welcome addition to the book.
As Villafañe showcases, the extent of Darío’s travels —not uncommon in the wandering careers of many writers then— reflects the peculiar position of the Latin American artist at the turn of the century, an era characterized by encroaching imperialism, accelerating means of transportation and a denser, world-wide circulation of goods. To any aspiring poet such as Darío, hailing from a poor, small country lacking in robust cultural institutions, the intensification of what we now call globalization entailed unheard-of difficulties, on the one hand, but also a whole array of novel opportunities, on the other.
Faced with the precarity of his vocation, the Nicaraguan quickly understood that his success would depend on his ability to augment and diversify his output, cater to an increasingly international audience and, above all, secure the sponsorship of the powerful. In addition to the sporadic stipends provided by literary magazines and events, he procured a stable income as a contributor to what was, back then, Latin America’s leading newspaper: Buenos Aires’ La Nación. From 1889 to 1915, he sent to the latter close to 700 chronicles (crónicas), a genre assiduously cultivated by foreign-based modernistas and eagerly consumed by the readership at home, hungry for the latest European novelties and fashionable trends. Furthermore, Darío took special care to ensure his audience a constant flow of publications, frequently recycling old material or occasionally turning to ghostwriters.
The trade also entailed, however, brokering multiple quid pro quo deals, as implicit as they were ubiquitous. More specifically, artists were expected to shrewdly exploit or at the very least navigate the intimate albeit unstable entanglements between art and politics. In Divino e infame, we see the Nicaraguan spend most of his time “looking for a patron,” engaging in “shameless adulation” and acting as a “courtesan poet,” always in search of “the fantasy of diplomatic sinecure.” And although he was repeatedly appointed as consul and chargé d’affaires, well-paid posts in which his overall performance was usually found wanting —Villafañe is unsparing in his evaluation of Darío’s diplomatic capabilities, given his own experience in the field—, they invariably came with strings attached. Political and ideological subservience was one of them, augmenting the patron’s image yet seriously damaging the poet’s public persona: in 1906, for example, Darío caused a continental outrage when he composed “Salutación al águila,” a poem that went against all he had formerly preached against U.S. imperialism. It was not an isolated case, for he was aware that such pleading obsequiousness, paired with a knack for self-promotion, opened many doors and “guaranteed his social position.”
Questionable as it may seem, this shifting behavior was actually incentivized by the era’s political instability, a volatile mix of abrupt regime changes and growing U.S. interventionism. Villafañe accurately fleshes out how Darío was caught in a dense web of conflicting and often irreconcilable dualisms: in Central America, “nationalism” collided with “unionism”; at the continental stage, “Latinamericanism” resisted “Panamericanism”; and at a higher, transatlantic level, “Hispanism” ballooned in the aftermath of the 1898 Spanish-American War. Darío, there is no doubt about it, was one of the most enthusiastic promoters of “Latin America,” however problematic that essentialist idea may be. But it is no less true that he saw these identitarian themes as rhetorical tools that he could wield to ingratiate himself, if need be, with whomever was in charge.
In the end, Darío’s opportunism qualified his own notions about art, which he regarded as emancipated and “essentially aristocratic.” This was the same man who confessed that “I was born to be Heliogabalus’ secretary” and once extolled none other than Theodore Roosevelt, of “big stick” fame, for his patronage policies. Few artists encapsulated so well the persistent incongruity between the lofty aspirations of art for art’s sake and its worldly, material conditions of possibility.
All of the above leads straight to the mystery at the heart of this book: that of Darío’s own identity or, to quote the subtitle, various “identities,” layers upon layers of them. And Villafañe, who bathes the poet in chiaroscuro, does not shirk from delving into his darker side: the incurable alcoholism, which harmed his reputation, hurt his artistic capabilities and sent him with cirrhosis to an early grave; the repetitive mistreatment of women and the indifference towards some of his children; finally, the unending obsession with luxury, money and “pomp and grandeur,” which impelled him to pile up debt after debt in pursuance of “bourgeois prosperity” and a “good social position.” Many witnesses recognized in him the type of the social upstart or what the French called, rather derisively, a “rastaquouère,” the Latin American arriviste par excellence. But he was also shy, susceptible to external influence, pathologically afraid of the dark —he slept with the lights on—, prone to occultism and religious fits, and physically unattractive, being small and somewhat stocky. Ultimately, Villafañe reminds us, “there is no ‘true’ Rubén Darío” (355), only a baffling aggregate of contradictions.
Famous figures tend to lose sight of themselves as their legend grows and expands. In his final years, Darío felt hopelessly deracinated, consumed by “an overwhelming solitude,” as if he belonged nowhere and to no one in particular: “everyone has a homeland, a family, a relative,” he wrote in 1913, “I have nothing.” And yet all sorts of interests, as so often happens, claimed him as their own after his death. Villafañe’s merit consists in clearing away these cumulative distortions and offering us an unprejudiced, historically informed portrait of the “liberator” of modern Spanish literature, to use Borges’ words. If one misses a more thorough analysis of his poetic oeuvre, it is only because Darío’s personality, and the backdrop against which it unfolded, invite us to re-assess it once again.
Alejandro Quintero Mächler is a Research Scholar and half-time Lecturer in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He is the author of Perder la cabeza en el siglo XIX. Ensayos sobre historia de Colombia e Hispanoamérica (2023).
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