Harvard Finds 2 Poems, and a Latin Romance
Reignites
September 19, 2000
ARTS IN AMERICA
By SIMON ROMERO
One wintry December day three years ago, David Whitesell, a rare-
book cataloger at Harvard University, walked from his windowless
office into the seemingly endless stacks in Widener Library. What
he found on one shelf made his heart race, and in recent months his
discovery has become the talk of literary circles in Latin America
and Spain.
Browsing through the stacks, Mr. Whitesell pulled down a book
with
attractive red binding by an obscure Argentine poet and leafed
through its pages. Scribbled in the book's margins and blank pages
were lines of verse in Spanish and the words works of in black ink.
Startled and in doubt, Mr. Whitesell put the book back on the
shelf.
But after a sleepless night, he returned to the library and
compared the scribbling with handwriting samples of Rubn Dar o, a
Nicaraguan modernist poet considered by many to be the equivalent
of an Ezra Pound or Walt Whitman in the Spanish language.
In an investigation corroborated by literary and rare-book
specialists, Mr. Whitesell found that he had unearthed two unknown
poems composed by Dar o at the turn of the century in addition to
several dozen books from the Nicaraguan writer's personal library
that Harvard acquired from a Madrid bookseller in 1916, the year
Dar o died.
Although Mr. Whitesell made the discovery in 1997, it took
until
early this year for Harvard to gather the writings and the portion
of Dar o's library initially uncovered by Mr. Whitesell into an
exhibition, "Rubn Dar o at Harvard: Books and Manuscripts from
the
Poet's Library." Eighty-four years after the poet's death, the
exhibition has drawn the fascinated attention of literary journals,
Web sites and newspapers from Barcelona to Buenos Aires.
In Nicaragua the newspaper La Prensa heralded the discovery with
a
front-page headline and an article that analyzed the poems in
detail. In Spain, the newspaper ABC commented that "Harvard has
so
many books it doesn't even know what it has." In Argentina, La
Nacin declared the find to be important simply because the poems
and books survived Dar o's "chaotic life." And in Chile, La
Tercera
called the discovery a "true intellectual detective adventure."
Why all the commotion?
Carmen Boullosa, a novelist who reviewed
the exhibition for the Mexican newspaper Reforma, considers `Rubn
Dar o to be "the greatest Latin American poet of all time,"
but
says that the reasons for the furor are more complicated.
"At a time when Latin America is plagued by violence and
economic
problems, Rubn Dar o, who dreamed we would be improved,
returns,"
she explained in a telephone interview from Mexico City. "Just
as
impressive, Harvard has placed him next to its volumes of Milton,
Donne, Montaigne."
Though his work is not widely known in English he is
considered
difficult to translate Dar o's grip on Spanish-language
writers
is explained by his interesting bohemian life as well as his
literary innovations. Born Flix Rubn Garc a y Sarmiento in a
muddy village called Metapa in 1867, he adopted the nom de plume
Dar o as a young man and spent his adult years in Santiago, Chile;
Buenos Aires; Madrid; and Paris.
Dar o is credited by many scholars as having set the
foundation
for innovation by such 20th-century Latin American writers as
Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garc a M rquez. In works like
"Azul,"
published in 1888, and "To Roosevelt," in 1904, Dar o
dispensed
with the conventional structures that had isolated Spanish and
Latin American writing from the modernist experimentalism then
tearing through French and English poetry and literature.
When Dar o died in 1916 at age 49, his mistress in Madrid,
Francisca S nchez, apparently sold numerous volumes in his
collection to a bookseller named Joaqu n Medinilla to cover debts.
More than 45 of Dar o's books, identified by dedications to the
poet or by the half-red binding that Dar o used for many of his
volumes, were subsequently acquired by J. D. M. Ford, the professor
who was in charge of Spanish and French acquisitions at the time,
according to Mr. Whitesell.
Mr. Whitesell, the cataloger who found the scribbled lines,
said:
"Finding unknown poems written by Dar o is something that
still
makes me tremble."
"But I also could not believe my eyes when I found part of
his
personal library in the depths of Widener," he said.
The two previously unknown poems were found in a book called
"Eglantinas" by Pedro J. Nan, an Argentine writer who has
since
faded into obscurity. One is sixlines long and begins with the
words "Sadness, sadness"; the other is a longer poem
called
"Epistolas," dedicated to a friend of Dar o's in Paris,
Amado
Nervo.
There are earlier versions of poems from Dar o's 1905 "Songs
of
Life and Hope," and a seashell-like sketch he made on top of
the
publisher's logo on a book's back cover.
"It is not as if the poems themselves, which represent only a
blip
on the radar screen of Dar o's career, are of great
importance,"
said Jos Antonio Mazzotti, a professor of Romance languages and
literature at Harvard. "More importantly, they show that Dar o
considered this book a minor work, which in effect it is, or else
he wouldn't have written in it."
Mr. Whitesell's discovery has been compared to the story line of
a
recent novel, "The Club Dumas," by the Spanish writer
Arturo
Prez-Reverte, in which the intrigue of the rare-book world is laid
bare. The book served as the basis for the screenplay for Roman
Polanski's recent movie "The Ninth Gate," starring Johnny
Depp.
"A discovery of this magnitude is quite rare," said
Richard Ramer,
a New York dealer of rare books written in Spanish and Portuguese.
"Given Rubn Dar o's stature, I would say this is one of the
most
important discoveries in recent years."
Others say that the discovery highlights the gulf between
academic
institutions in the United States and those in Latin America.
"It's
telling of the resources gap between the United States and
Nicaragua that Harvard would have little or no idea of the
treasures it holds," said Paul Berman, a cultural critic who
recently researched Dar o as a fellow at the Center for Scholars
and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Harvard's budget for the year ended in June was almost $1.8
billion, nearly twice the federal budget of Nicaragua, which Pedro
Zeas, an economic official at the United States Embassy in Managua,
estimated at $901 million this year.
The reawakened interest in Dar o has stirred pride among
Nicaraguan writers.
"It is as if the glue that holds us together has become
stronger,"
said Pablo Antonio Cuadra, a former editor of La Prensa and one of
the country's most prominent poets, in a telephone interview from
Managua. Julio Valle Castillo, a Nicaraguan poet who is preparing a
screenplay based on Dar o's life, welcomed the discovery as "a
glimpse into the creative process of our greatest subject."