I wrote this book because my Cuban ancestors were some of the humble farmers who attended poetry readings when Darío traveled to the island. Little did he know how inspiring his poetry would be for my great-grandmother and all her descendants. At family gatherings, Darío’s verses were recited, just as I described in The Wild Book, a verse novel about my grandmother’s childhood. In fact, the Nicaraguan poet was so revered in our family that two of my great-uncles were named Rubén and Darío in his honor, and I am not the first Margarita.
With a Star in My Hand is historical fiction based on the autobiography of Rubén Darío (1867–1916). All the events and situations are factual, and because Darío wrote so clearly about his childhood and youth, most of the emotional aspects are also taken from documented sources. Only a few small details have been imagined.
Darío is known as the Father of modernismo, a literary movement that blended poetry and prose, complex rhymes, assonance (vowel rhymes), and free verse, as well as classical European and indigenous Native American images. The 1888 publication of Azul in Valparaíso—when Darío was only twenty-one—is widely regarded as a revolutionary turning point in world literature. Until that time, romantic poetry tended to be overly sentimental, dwelling on one’s own emotions instead of observing the entire world, with its interwoven array of troubles and beauty.
Darío’s importance continued to grow throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and continues long after his death. His birthplace, the town of Metapa, is now called Ciudad Darío. The National Library of Nicaragua was renamed in his honor. His childhood home in León is a museum visited by poets from all over the world.
As the early twentieth-century mentor of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Darío influenced Spain’s Generation of 1927, a group of poets who spoke out against the fascist dictatorship of Franco. They included Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, and Rafael Alberti, who in turn influenced Mexico’s Octavio Paz, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier, Chile’s Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, and Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez. Unifying themes for all these writers are freedom, imagination, and the dream of social justice. It is a literary tradition that still thrives today, in the work of nearly every modern Latin American and US Latino poet and novelist.
Pablo Neruda described Darío as a sonorous elephant who shattered all the crystals of an era to let in fresh air. Pedro Salinas wrote that Darío was always half in this world and half out of it, a dreamy tendency which can be found in the work of all “magic realists,” modern Latin America’s answer to fantasy. Described in Spanish as lo real maravilloso (marvelous reality), magic realism shows ordinary lives touched by specific natural and supernatural marvels, rather than imagining completely separate alternate worlds.
After the publication of Azul in Chile, Darío returned to Nicaragua. He was received as a hero in León, but soon moved to El Salvador, where he became the director of a newspaper that promoted the unification of Central America as one country. Soon after he got married, he was forced to flee to Guatemala due to a military coup that overthrew the government of El Salvador. Over the next few decades, he lived in many countries, wrote for newspapers, published several poetry books, served as Nicaragua’s ambassador to various countries, and was often impoverished.
Despite a stormy personal life and sophisticated literary body of work, Rubén Darío is most often remembered by the general public for his rhymed fairy tale, “A Margarita Debayle.” He composed this long poem spontaneously, when the five-year-old daughter of a friend asked him to tell her a story.
“A Margarita Debayle” is so beloved in every Spanish-speaking country that it has been recited by parents and grandparents to the spellbound children of many generations. The story of a princess who flies to the sky to claim a star for herself was far ahead of its time, showing girls that they could be independent. “A Margarita Debayle” begins with an introduction that many Latino children know by heart:
Margarita, está linda la mar,
y el viento
lleva esencia sutil de azahar;
yo siento
en el alma una alondra cantar:
tu acento.
Margarita, te voy a cantar
un cuento.
Without attempting to reproduce the beautiful rhyme, assonance, and meter, the above stanza can be loosely translated as:
Margarita, the sea is beautiful,
and the wind
carries a subtle scent of orange blossoms;
I feel
a skylark singing in my soul:
your voice.
Margarita, I am going to tell you
a story.
To read the entire long poem in rhymed English, see Rosalma Zubizarreta’s expert translation at the end of Dancing Home by Alma Flor Ada and Gabriel M. Zubizarreta (Atheneum, 2011).