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Leon feels like a wet wool sweater, the humidy is palpabul and everpresent.
Nearly one hundred years ago Ruben Dario left the small city of Leon and embarked on journey that would take him to South America, Spain and in the end back to Leon, where he would die of TK, but revered as the most famous poet in Latin America.
Yet hardly anyone north of Mexico has ever heard of Ruben Dario. Part of the reason lies in the cultural gap between the United States and its neighbors to the south. Part of it lies in the fact that Darios manipulations of spanish are so subtle and so masterful that translating them to English is nearly impossible -- a feat very few have dared to undertake.
To this day only one slim volume of Darios poems has been translated into English and unfortunately the translation does, as most claimed it would, fail in its attempts to put Dario's deft wordplay into a new language.
from the nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/echevarria/2
"the futility of the search for an aesthetic ideal coupled with the need to relentlessly continue it" -- or as Beckett wrote -- I can't go on, I'll go on.
Stavans's introduction lacks scholarly credibility or academic reliability. It is riddled with clichés (Darío is a "man for all seasons"), lacks a single new idea worth considering and does no justice to the considerable body of Darío criticism. Like the translations, it contains elementary mistakes, some laughable. For instance, Stavans attributes the famous line encouraging poets to reject Darío by twisting the swan's neck to the Mexican Modernista Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, when it was written by his compatriot Enrique González Martínez. He also blithely declares that "Latin America never had a Romantic movement per se," an elementary error that he could have avoided by reading any history of Latin American literature or one of those academic critics Stavans derides with unearned, comic self-assurance. Stavans even writes that Darío's "health deteriorated rapidly in the years following World War I," when the poet had been dead for two years at war's end in 1918. His health could hardly have gotten worse.
There are poets condemned to remain within their own language. Because of its many failings, this anthology cannot possibly help Darío overcome this fate.
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