Rediscovering Ruben Dario through Translation

A long overdue examination of Ruben Dario's multilingual work and influences alongside the contexts and politics of canonization in world literature.

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