Hieratismo en movimiento: Rubén Darío, Stéphane Mallarmé y “La página blanca”

Abstract

Under the drive of postcolonial and postmodern relativism of cultural studies and the geopolitical obsolescence of area studies, two recent interpretative paradigms have reinvigorated interest in Spanish-American modernismo. Both in terms of the agenda of a Latin Americanism focused on the discussion around world literature as for the one based on transatlantic studies, modernismo seems to be the seed of an internationalization of culture that reorganizes the local literary map. For these approaches, modernismo displaces the concern about national boundaries and identities towards the idea of a world composed by asymmetrical flows between centers and peripheries and a system, unequal as well, of legitimation relationships and aesthetic configuration. Taking as its basis an analysis of Rubén Darío’s literary project in the portraits of Los raros and in the poem “La página blanca,” this article aims to make a critical evaluation of the contact between the Nicaraguan poet and Stéphane Mallarmé in order to reconsider two important problems in the history of readings of modernismo: the translation of languages, aesthetics and semiotic systems, and the cultural networks, which trace, in modernismo, a virtual and future American polis.