“Psique”: un relato recuperado de Rubén Darío

Abstract

Perhaps the part of Rubén Darío’s oeuvre that has presented the most difficulties for literary critics is his short stories, as many of these works were not published in one collected volume while the author was alive, but remained scattered in the pages of magazines and journals in the cities where the Nicaraguan resided. Thanks to their invaluable archival work, researchers such as Erwin Kempton Mapes, Diego Manuel Sequeira, Julio Saavedra Molina, Raúl Silva Castro, Máximo Soto Hall, Regino E. Boti, Teodoro Picado, Julio Caillet-Bois, Enrique Anderson Imbert, Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, Pedro Luis Barcia, Jorge Eduardo Arellano and Günther Schmigalle located, between 1920 and 1980, a considerable amount of prose texts written by Darío. These works have been collected under the title Cuentos completos. However, frequent discoveries of testimonies that add to Darío’s short story corpus allow us to argue that some of his texts may not have been unearthed yet. This paper discusses one of such cases; a text signed by R. D., titled “Psique”, was published in the Buenos Aires magazine La Hoja, dated on March 15th, 1894 —a year during which Darío lived in Argentina’s capital city. Aside from offering a transcription of the document, the paper analyses the short story’s features to highlight the thematic and stylistic similarities that “Psique” shares with other texts by Darío.