Travel in the "crónica modernista" : the case of Rubén Darío

Abstract

Rubén Darío was a conspicuous traveler: since 1886, when at the age of 19 he left his fatherland, Nicaragua, in search of new horizons and stimuli —both vital as well as artistic—, until his final return to his country in 1916 to die there, travelling is a constant presence throughout his work. We propose here to present a general overview about the different ways in which Darío approaches in his discourse to the travel experience (as subjects, as a reflection, as a metaphor, as a place of utterance, as a structuring axis for a text, as a confluence of styles) in a relevant part of his production: the journalistic chronicle. It must be taken into account that two thirds of the whole canon produced by Darío is made of texts written for the press, many among them focused on travel, so that the approach to a corpus of such chronicles, within a homogeneity of subject and focus, should allow us to establish certain constant parameters, such as the oscillating collocation of the utterance voice, the style markers, the discourse strategies, and the rhetorical setup of a Janical [two-headed] textuality, amid journalism and literature. Darío travels within quite wide boundaries moved by both his cosmopolitan eagerness as well as his professional commitments. This twofold motivation resulted in the oscillations of the utterance voice emerging from his texts: that of the flâneur, that of the cultivated traveler who pours his impressions and translate the signs of European modernity to Argentinian readers, that of a tourist, that of a dreamer. But beyond this variants the poet imposes always his point of view.