Rediscovering Rubén Darío Through Translation

A long overdue examination of Rub?n Dar?o's multilingual work and influences alongside the contexts and politics of canonization in world literature.

Rediscovering Rub?n Dar?o through Translation addresses the peculiar obscurity of Dar?o 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 Garc?a M?rquez) 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 Dar?o's oeuvre through translation. In doing so, he explores not only the place of Dar?o in the translation of Spanish American literature into English, but also the place of translation in Dar?o's own writing. The result is a double-sided painting, as it were: the recto is titled "Translation in Dar?o" and the verso "Dar?o 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 Dar?o's writing alongside that of his contemporaries. As a result, it reveals the multilingualism of Dar?o's own writing, opening new avenues for the study of his work and of Spanish American modernismo more generally.