After Rubén

by Francisco Aragon

  In high school, when I sought these poems out, it was the English translations of Lysander Kemp I had to read. I don’t recall, however, reading his versions with as much delight as listening to my mother. Although I grew up speaking and understanding spoken Spanish, I was illiterate until I began to study the language formally at UC Berkeley.

  My first meaningful experience as a reader of Spanish was when, living in Spain as a student, I set out to read Ian Gibson’s two-volume biography of Federico García Lorca. In volume one, in a section where he is making light of the profound impact Rubén Darío’s work had on the young Lorca, Gibson quotes, in full, a Darío masterpiece: “Lo fatal.” I was finally able to properly experience what all the fuss was about.

  Because I was aspiring to write poems of my own, I wondered how “Lo fatal” might sound in English. It was a poem, for the most part, bereft of images. Its power resided in its gorgeous rhythms and rhymes and, I think, its arresting theme. It was a poem that didn’t lend itself, in my view, to conventional modes of translation. Not knowing any better, I decided to re-cast the piece as I saw fit. I deployed very short lines, ignoring the poem’s original sonnet-like shape. The result was a draft of what became the second poem in section two of this book: “The Inevitable.” It remained, for many years, my one and only attempt at what I’m certain would be considered blasphemous in most translation circles. Looking back, it was personal: I was the son of Nicaraguan immigrants who heard Darío as a child. I was giving myself permission to play with Rubén, my Rubén.

  My early efforts at literary translation were with the work of the late Francisco X. Alarcón; the homoerotic sonnets of Federico García Lorca; and the avant-garde verse of Lorca’s contemporary, Gerardo Diego—the latter as my thesis while pursuing an M.A. in Hispanic Civilization through New York University (“NYU in Spain”). This encompassed the late eighties to the early nineties in Madrid.

  It wasn’t until my first semester as an MFA candidate in creative writing that I returned to Rubén Darío. Context meant everything. My first workshop at Notre Dame was a revelation. John Matthias organized the course with translation as the lens through which we would view and do everything. Matthias’s workshop made manifest something another former teacher, Thom Gunn, had said in an undergraduate workshop at Berkeley. Paraphrasing: “Reading, as experiences go, can also serve as a source of inspiration for our poems.”

  Matthias’s workshop made possible the other nine Darío versions and riffs dispersed throughout sections one through four of this book, not to mention a number of other pieces that splice lines and fragments from other poetic texts. The reader, at this point, might be asking what, precisely, did he have us do? Mostly, he assigned, and had us thoroughly discuss, certain crucial texts. George Steiner’s After Babel was one. Robert Lowell’s Imitations was another. And then, simply, we were free to pursue our passions. For me it was a matter of testing certain ideas and methods out on Rubén Darío during those fifteen weeks in the fall of 2001. What do I mean? Well, this notion that the source text—a poem in Spanish for instance—could be a vehicle for writing a poem in English, one closely inspired by the original—or, to render the source poem into a very liberal English version of the original. Notice: I’m avoiding the term “translation,” its traditional sense. It was the beginning, I think, of my blossoming interest and preoccupation in works of art inspired by other works of art. In this first phase, it was a matter of one text begetting another. As the years progressed I began to grow increasingly interested, obsessed even, in the phenomena of the visual and plastic arts becoming the springboard for literary art. But for the matter at hand: most of my Darío versions in After Rubén had their start in Matthias’s workshop.

  II

  The nameless storefront, hours north of San Francisco, looked abandoned: the plate glass windows were covered, from the inside, with newspaper—like a business gone bust on the town’s main strip. The town was Corning, just south of Red Bluff. I tapped the glass firmly with a nickel, and waited. The door opened. The man standing before me was bleary-eyed, his hair gray, abundant, disheveled, looking as if he’d just crawled out of bed, though it was two in the afternoon. He was wearing corduroys and a wrinkled shirt—a turtleneck. “Hola, papá,” I said. My father opened the door further, gestured for me to step inside. When he shut the door everything went dark. At a distance, some light seeped through what looked to be a wide curtain hung from a cord that spanned the width of the room. The Price Is Right blared from a television behind it. My eyes adjusted: some empty display cases immediately off to the side—the kind you see in a jewelry store. I discerned bulging bags piled high in the corners to the left and right. I caught a shadow slinking by: a cat. I noticed sparsely populated clothing racks. “Let me show you around,” he said and began to walk away. I followed him down a pathway of stuff—boxes mostly. Once I was past the glass cases, the low-ceilinged room seemed to open up and there were beds, three of them, up against the wall on the right. There were dressers, too, placed in between the beds as if they were functioning as low walls—as if each bed and dresser constituted a makeshift “room” in that storefront-turned-living space. My father approached what I saw were hanging bedsheets; he slipped his hand into a seam and swept one of them aside like a stage curtain, and stepped into the light.

  In the months after my mother’s death in January of 1997, I paid my father two visits up in Corning, each lasting ten days. One evening, during the first visit, while strolling down the main drag on our way to Safeway, the subject of poetry came up and he began to tell me about his favorite Rubén Darío poem: “Los motivos del lobo.” I didn’t know the poem and so listened intently as my father paraphrased the story from Saint Francis of Assisi’s life, as depicted by Darío—how he tamed the wolf that had been terrorizing an Italian village; how the wolf lapsed back to being a wild animal; how Saint Francis, sad at this turn of events, began to say the Our Father to end the poem. When I returned to Spain that June, I tracked the poem down, and marveled at it, admiring how Darío had taken a well-known, popular, perhaps even sentimental myth—and complicated it, making it more interesting, nuanced, problematic.

  Why hadn’t I attempted to render this poem into English during that seminal workshop with John Matthias? At six pages, perhaps I deemed it too long for my semester project; perhaps I wanted to attempt shorter Darío poems first, and leave the wolf poem for later. In fact, it wasn’t until 2002 or 2003 that I took the wolf poem with me to Europe on a week-long, self-directed writing retreat. The task I’d set for myself was one, and one only. “Los motivos del lobo” became, in Dublin, Ireland, “The Man and the Wolf”—a free verse poem in forty-seven tercets and a single final line. Like a number of the pieces in this book, it became one of my after Rubén Darío poems. Before finding a more permanent home here, “The Man and the Wolf” took up residence in 2006 in Evensong: Contemporary American Poets on Spirituality. In my headnote for that volume, I spoke about how the poem became a kind of metaphor for those twenty days I spent with my father in the wake of my mother’s death. Twenty years later, it’s still a poem I immediately associate with him. Increasingly, I’ve come to think of it as his gift to me—my inheritance.

  III

  [I]f we sanitize, compromise, or self-censor, we are only pulling out our wings.

  —Rigoberto González

  The e-invitation landed in my inbox in mid-November of 2012. It began: “Dear Writer Friend, I want to let you know that I’m beginning—and ending—a literary magazine. A one-issue deal, that issue ending up solely in the hands of the writers contained in it . . . The magazine will be called Forward to Velma, and will be epistolary: one of letters, correspondence.”

  Considering the source of the invitation, and how interesting I deemed its parameters, I immediately thought, Yes—I’m in. Around this time, I’d also become aware of a press release from earlier in the month titled, “ASU Libraries acquires rare manuscripts of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío.” One paragrap
h leapt off the page:

  “The documents have already begun to alter the scholarship on Darío. The peer-reviewed Bulletin of Spanish Studies,’ a prestigious academic journal from the United Kingdom, has published an article by [Alberto] Acereda in its September 2012 issue based on the letters found in the ASU collection. The article, ‘Nuestro más profundo y sublime secreto: Los amores transgresores entre Rubén Darío y Amado Nervo,’ reveals for the first time a secret romantic relationship between Darío and famed Mexican poet Amado Nervo (1870–1919).”

  The revelation felt seismic. Up until then, my gay literary mentors had been unapologetically “out.” Or, even if they weren’t direct mentors, were “out” as far as how public consciousness perceived them. But Rubén Darío? He wasn’t part of that pantheon. He wasn’t Hart Crane or Oscar Wilde. He wasn’t, for that matter, Amado Nervo himself, about whom my gay literary friends in Spain had let that penny drop over twenty years ago.

  Darío’s persona had always seemed somewhat anguished to me, tormented even; and so this revelation added a poignant, if bittersweet, sheen to his biography. Is it possible that I saw something of myself in that anguish—was that why this revelation struck me as it did?

  I was indeed a skinny, insecure boy with a skateboard in the years before I entered high school—as the first poem in this book hints at. My refuge, as I intimated in the essay that punctuated my last book, Glow of Our Sweat, was schoolwork and sports. Skateboarding was another. I was a connoisseur of sorts—not acquiring a board that was ready-made, but putting one together part by part: a fiberglass deck, a particular brand of trucks, polyurethane wheels. A nerd of the genre in other words. My red zephyr with its black, custom-fit grip tape was my ride—for exploring San Francisco streets I wouldn’t otherwise venture down, on foot.

  Once, I rode past a frame shop that also carried, I discovered, greeting cards aimed at a particular audience of the masculine persuasion. I found myself browsing, now and then, plucking cards from the rack to quench a certain gaze. But that afternoon in 1980 when I spotted my mother across the street as I exited the shop, board in hand, marked my last visit. In my essay, I said it like this: “And in darker moments, this thought: I’d rather be dead than have anyone, friend or stranger, learn my secret.”

  Through one of my contacts at ASU, I managed to land an e-introduction to Alberto Acereda. He was kind enough to send me a PDF of his eye-opening article, which I promptly devoured. It included the nine letters Darío had written to Nervo. The last one was penned on January 12, 1915. The Hotel Astor near Times Square had provided stationery. This final letter left no doubt about the nature of the bond between the two Spanish-language poets.

  When I’d first received that invitation to submit a piece to Forward to Velma, it occurred to me that this Darío-Nervo story was ripe with possibility in terms of subject matter. After reading Acereda’s article, possibility became certainty: I knew what kind of poem I would draft.

  Or so I thought. Sergio Ramírez, a prominent Nicaraguan writer, soon weighed in, online, with a thousand-word piece in which he denounced the nine letters as false. His argument, at first glance, seemed plausible, pointing out some erroneous dates, questions to do with Darío’s handwriting, other incidentals.

  If my initial impulse was to pen a poem in the voice of Rubén Darío addressed to his secret lover, this latest twist spurred an imaginative leap in a different direction. The epistle would still be in Darío’s voice, but it would be a letter addressed to this skeptical public figure—from the grave. I should say, for the record, that I love Ramírez’s work, one novel in particular in which, it so happens, he movingly depicts two periods from Rubén Darío’s life, including his final moments. If I haven’t made it explicitly clear, reading was another refuge during those lonely years.

  Including the summer I fell in love with Frank O’Hara. It was immediately after my first year at Cal—before I enrolled in my first writing workshop and concurrently joined the staff of the Berkeley Poetry Review. During the spring semester of 1985, I discovered that the course offerings that June included a class called Literature and the Arts. The topic was American poetry and painting—specifically, cubism and abstract expressionism. We’d be reading William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara. I enrolled in a New York minute, not really cognizant of how lucky I was. The instructor was the late James E.B. Breslin, who would go on to write a seminal biography of Mark Rothko, but who I would mostly know from his From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965—one of my favorite books about poetry. I liked all the poets we read that summer well enough. But Frank O’Hara’s exuberance and verve just bowled me over, turning him into one of my first gay literary heroes.

  I commuted to class from San Francisco that summer, and one afternoon, riding BART, absently flipping through the dog-eared pages of Selected Poems with its Larry Rivers nude of O’Hara on the cover, I casually read the editor’s bio in the back and saw that Donald Allen “resided in San Francisco.” As soon as I got home I grabbed the phone book and confirmed in the White Pages that Allen lived on Grand View—a thirty or so minute walk from my home.

  The neatly typed beige postcard read: “Dear Mr. Aragon: Thank you for your lovely letter. I no longer edit verse. I would be delighted to meet you. My phone number is 824-7211. Sincerely, Donald Allen.” When the appointed day arrived, I stepped out onto the sidewalk on Fair Oaks, turned left and walked up the hill to the corner, turning right on 24th and proceeded to walk up another hill, crossing Dolores into the heart of Noe Valley, continuing for ten blocks, past Castro, Diamond, Douglass, Hoffman, turning right on Grand View and walking down a slope and then up, until I reached the address of the nondescript apartment building. I rang the bell, was buzzed in. Greeting me at the door was a man of seventy or so, medium-build with a trim moustache and a head of beautiful white hair, wearing a cardigan. He invited me to take a seat on his immaculate sofa, his apartment exquisitely arranged, antique pieces here and there. He served coffee and cake, asked if I cared to listen to music. He put on something classical, in a volume discreet enough to permit conversation. I tentatively asked about Frank O’Hara. Allen recounted with humor and affection that Frank loved sharing stories from his time in the Navy, details of which he chose not to reveal, and which I was too shy to ask for. I’d been sitting there for about an hour when Allen rose, disappeared, and came back with two books he was kind enough to sign. Standing Still and Walking in New York, featuring a striking photograph of O’Hara and Larry Rivers with arms crossed, leaning on a building while appearing to fix their gaze on something in front of them. And Frank O’Hara: Early Writing, in white script against green and featuring a very young O’Hara in profile looking to the left, with his slightly crooked nose—broken, according to Allen, from a boxing match in his youth. It was now my cue to leave. I said goodbye to Donald Allen, the legendary editor of American poetry. I was nineteen. And very much still in the closet.

  As I found myself quietly immersed in this Nicaraguan polemic involving Rubén Darío’s letters, what inevitably came to mind was Spain’s often fraught relationship with its national poetry treasure: Federico García Lorca. In 2009 Ian Gibson, pre-eminent biographer and scholar, offered this on the occasion of Lorca y el mundo gay, his fourth and final book on the Andalusian poet: “Spain couldn’t accept that the greatest Spanish poet of all time was homosexual. Homophobia existed on both sides of the civil war.” Was there a similar dynamic unfolding with Nicaragua’s national poetry treasure?

  I wrote and submitted my poem to Forward to Velma, titling it “January 21, 2013”—a piece that went on to occupy its place in the privately published and distributed literary magazine, after which it appeared in a public print journal, and then an online magazine, and then again in an anthology of Central American writing in the U.S., and then my fourth chapbook, before finally settling into the pages of After Rubén.

  In the months that followed, I wondered if there would be a r
esponse to the charge that these letters were falsified. That summer I had my answer. In its 2013 edition, Siglo diecinueve (Literatura hispánica), a peer-reviewed annual edited in Spain, published “Los manuscritos Darianos de Arizona. Autenticidad de la colección y apostillas a las cartas a Amado Nervo” by none other than Alberto Acereda. As with his piece published in Bulletin of Spanish Studies, once I was able to land a PDF of the Siglo diecinueve article, I carefully read it, and re-read it, with much interest.

  Acereda prosecuted his case over the course of thirty-one pages, offering detailed context for every one of the nine letters, including reports of how maps and almanacs of early 19th century Madrid and New York were studied in order to pin down the geographical circumstances of each and every letter.

  Although he didn’t explicitly claim homophobia as the motivation for the push-back this new branch of Darío scholarship was encountering, he seemed to insinuate it. One allegation he cited was that there was an error in a date in one of the letters. All throughout Darío scholarship, Acereda countered, where documents in Darío’s own hand had played a central role, there had been a number of instances where scholars had come upon discrepancies and/or errors. In those cases, scholars were often able to correct, amend, or offer plausible explanations, using other primary sources and cross references to bolster their conclusions. In none of those cases, Acereda observed, had the authenticity of the Darío manuscripts been called into question. It had always been understood, and accepted, that artists—human beings after all—sometimes got their dates mixed up. What is more, he argued, why would a deliberate falsifier get dates wrong if the aim was to have the falsified document appear authentic?