Rediscovering Rubén Darío through Translation

Book excerpt: A long overdue examination of Rubén Darío's multilingual work and influences alongside the contexts and politics of canonization in world literature. Rediscovering Rubén Darío through Translation addresses the peculiar obscurity of Darío by asking these questions: How can one of the most important writers of a major world language be almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world? How is it that other writers of the same language (e.g., Lorca or García Márquez) achieve widespread recognition in the anglophone world, while he remains unnoticed? What role does translation play in this? What can it tell us about the way in which world literature is articulated? Carlos F. Grigsby approaches Darío's oeuvre through translation. In doing so, he explores not only the place of Darío in the translation of Spanish American literature into English, but also the place of translation in Darío's own writing. The result is a double-sided painting, as it were: the recto is titled “Translation in Darío” and the verso “Darío in Translation.” This book challenges the field of world literature by revealing some of the biases present in its representation of Spanish American literature. It adopts a multilingual framework – chiefly using English, Spanish, French, and to a lesser degree Latin and Catalan – in analyzing Darío's writing alongside that of his contemporaries. As a result, it reveals the multilingualism of Darío's own writing, opening new avenues for the study of his work and of Spanish American modernismo more generally.