The Diplomat
On the occasion of the 154th anniversary of the birth of the poet Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan Embassy, with its ambassador Carlos Midence at the head, in collaboration with the Corporación RTVE and Casa América, celebrated in this cultural centre a tribute to the Nicaraguan writer, who was the subject of the documentary film Tierras solares, directed by Laura Hojman.
Ambassador Midence thanked the guests for attending, among whom were the former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the ambassadors of Costa Rica and Greece and representatives of the legations of the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, “under complex circumstances, overcoming them, always moving forward, offering with this gesture, a prominent value to culture, to thought, as Minister Rodríguez Uribes rightly says: culture is safe, it is necessary and it enlightens us”.
Carlos Midence stressed that “Darío is not only a monumental poet, he is the great renewer of poetry, the before and after, as Borges and Octavio Paz said, he is also an excellent prose writer, a strengthener, some say creator, of the contemporary journalistic chronicle. He was also a great traveller. Master, as Juan Ramón Jiménez called him. Rubén is a pedagogue, an educator, because he not only founded a cultural revolution, but he also knew how to radiate it, expand it, both geographically and epistemically, because when listening to his work, we learn that such vigorous currents of thought as arielism and calibanism, which have been opposed by the intellectuals of our continent to the Anglo-Saxon currents that are supposed to be uniform, were formulated by the poet in such representative writings as the Triumph of Caliban or in his masterpiece Los Raros. Dario led us through that long epistemological process that advocates the use of categories of thought that emerge organically from our American or Hispanic American experience”.
In the documentary film Tierras solares (1904), Rubén Darío compiles the chronicles of two journeys through Europe that he made between December 1903 and May 1904. The first was through Barcelona, Andalusia, Gibraltar and Tangiers and the second through Belgium, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy”.
For her part, the Under-secretary of the Ministry of Culture and Sport, Andrea Gavela, said “Rubén Darío, Prince of Castilian Letters and Father of Modernism, who made literature freer by filling it with colour and music, was also a prose writer and a good traveller. He travelled through Andalusia at the beginning of the 20th century, fulfilling a youthful dream, a journey in search of sun and light. The result of his stay in our country are the journalistic chronicles that were published in the Argentine newspaper La Nación and later brought together in his book Tierras solares, published in 1904. I conclude convinced”, she ended,”that this is the first of the opportunities this year 2021 offers us to celebrate the culture that unites us.”
