Félix Rubén García Sarmiento (d: 1916), known as RUBÉN DARÍO was born on this date. A Nicaraguan poet, Darío has had a great and lasting influence on 20th-century Spanish literature and journalism. He has been praised as the “Prince of Castilian Letters” and undisputed father of the modernismo literary movement.
In 2012, Arizona State University Libraries acquired a privately-held collection of manuscripts created by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío.
The comprehensive collection contains hundreds of pages of Darío’s poetry and other creative works. Several of the manuscripts are signed transcripts, written in Darío’s hand, of some of his most important works including “Coloquio de los Centauros,” two versions of “Los motivos del lobo” and “Canto épico a las glorias de Chile,” a manuscript of 76 pages, which was one of Darío’s first long poems.
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 Professor Acereda in its August 2012 issue based on letters found in ASU’s collection. The article, “‘Nuestro más profundo y sublime secreto’: Los amores transgresores entre Rubén Darío y Amado Nervo,” (“Our Most Profound and Sublime Secret: The Transgressive Love of Ruben Dario and Amado Nervo”) reveals for the first time a secret romantic relationship between Darío and famed Mexican poet Amado Nervo (1870-1919.)
“The exact nature of this relationship is evidenced in a series of intimate letters exchanged between the two poets and they help us to better understand the respective works of these modernist authors, as well as to establish a rereading of certain texts,” Acereda said.
David W. Foster, Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at ASU, noted that “the acquisition of such a collection, which has the possibility of suggesting a major revision in our understanding of Rubén Darío’s sexuality, is only possible through the efforts of outstanding senior faculty like Acereda, who have the advanced (and often anonymous) contacts necessary for such material to become part of ASU’s superb research collections.”