Rediscovering Rubén Darío through Translation

by Carlos F. Grigsby

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798765119129
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/22/2026
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Carlos F. Grigsby is a Nicaraguan poet and a lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published articles on Darío in journals such as the Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Modern Language Review, and chapters in collections such as Multilingual Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Central American Literatures as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Translation in Darío
1. Thinking in French and Writing in Spanish
2. Not Only from the Roses of Paris
Part 2. Darío in Translation
3. English Translations of Rubén Darío
Coda: Translating Darío's Poetics of (H)armonía
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Grigsby's detailed comparisons of Dario's early poems with the French works that inspired them demonstrate with ground-breaking clarity that many can be classified as creative rewritings, or free translations, of works by Gautier, Arthur Rimbaud or Paul Verlaine. ... [Darío] was included only gradually, and not always successfully, in the more active culture of translating Spanish American literature ... that began to flourish in the 1960s. Grigsby's unsparing assessments of these translations' flaws are convincing. He is bold enough to offer translations of his own as correctives. ... This daring, intelligent book provides important new insights into Dario's verse.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Carlos F. Grigsby discovers a new way of reading Rubén Darío. Darío's poetry emerges at the crossroads of multiple languages and transnational cultural traditions, and Grigsby argues that Darío's poetry itself is a translation, that is, a work on languages, on the articulation of languages, and an experimentation with differences. Darío's writing has been extensively studied with a focus on the cultural archives with which he was in dialogue. This book proposes that his poetry is a way of using other literatures to forge one's own, not only as cultural archive but also as a linguistic one. By this way of reading, the author presents a Darío in conversation with the languages of his contemporaries and with the classics, a Darío who still lives in those dialogues and whose work regains relevance in the framework of translations.” —Graciela Montaldo, Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University, USA

“Grigsby's superb book offers a master class on poetic analysis and translation. He rigorously unveils Darío's radical ingenuity and creative engagement with multiple languages, often obscured in its critical reception by misconceived ideas of imitation, and shows how mistranslations of Darío's poetry into English have contributed to rendering him almost invisible in Anglo-American literary circles. A trailblazing contribution to Darío, modernism, and translation studies.” —Alejandro Mejías-López, Associate Professor of Spanish, Indiana University, USA

From the Publisher