Looting the file, hearing yourself in the echo: The voracious reading of the European archive in the poetry of Rubén Darío

Abstract

When reading Latin American literature from the autobiographical genre, Sylvia Molloy proposes that its appropriation of European culture takes place through the voracious looting of its archive. Pursuing this Argentinean author’s ideas, this article seeks to offer a reading of this voracious procedure in the work of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, focusing particularly on one of his poems, “Caracol”, in dialogue with other of his poems, as well as comparing it with works by Julián del Casal, a contemporary Cuban poet with whom Darío shared a common interest in modern French culture. From the reading of these poems, we intend to show how the use of the European tradition prompts an encounter with our own literature, in which the irreverence in the use of the archive imposes itself on the copy.

Keywords:
Rubén Darío; Hispanic American Modernism; cultural relations; archive