Ruben Dario's "Emelina"

Abstract

F EW PEOPLE today are aware of the fact that Rub6n Dari , in coll boration with the Chilean Eduardo Poirier,' produced a novel in his youth. According to Francisco Contreras in the prologue, Emelina2 was written and published in 1887 in Valparaiso where Dario came to know Poirier. Though the work is available and Dario specialists are generally aware of it, they tend to disregard it or to dispose of it in passing as a novela folletinesca in poor taste. Yet it is worth studying for the early signs it contains of Dario's future greatness. This Chilean sojourn was Dario's first experience with the world beyond his native Nicaragua. It was here that he came to know, although in translation, the major French authors of the time (Daudet, Zola, Goncourt, Flaubert, Mendes).3 Contreras tells us that Poirier suggested their coauthorship of the novel as a means of gaining money for Dario by entering it in the Certamen Varela competition, which it failed to win.4 It is difficult to establish the exact degree of participation of each in the work. Contreras concludes (without explanation) that the description of Paris, the gala celebration given by Guzmin Blanco5 and the wedding scenes at the end are by Dario and that the first three chapters are by Poirier. The rest, because they are in correct Castilian and with traditional orthography (rare phenomena in the Chile of that time), he also attributes to Dario. Further evidence is offered in the observation that the protagonist Gavidia seems to be named after Dario's best friend and that Poirier could not possibly have known Guzmin Blanco as well as the work seems to indicate. On the other hand, Armando Donoso (Dario, Obras de juventud, Santiago: Nascimento, 1927) insists that Dario contributed only Chapter IX (the Paris description) in Part II and that all the rest is a feisima novelicula. Radil Silva Castro (Ruben Dario a los veinte aijos, Madrid: Gredos, 1956) maintains that Dario does not enter until Part II, Chapter IX. While the foregoing chapters are all very sobre and formal in style and tone (in the prologue to the novel Poirier himself calls it honrada y pulcra), Dario's rapid, nervous pen with its exotic elements and its flights of fantasy becomes visible in the Paris scene. On the same basis he assigns Chapters I, II, V, VIII and XI in Part III to Dario and concludes that both authors are visible in the remainder. It would appear that Silva's analysis is the most perceptive. The extent of Darlo's participation is further corroborated by the fact that the title itself was probably contributed by him (he had written a love poem of the same name in his adolescence to Emelina Rosario Murillo, whom he later married in 1892). Emelina, written in great haste (ten days) and primarily for mercenary motives, is Dario's only novel. Chronologically, it predates Azul (1888) and all the other prose fiction for which Dario achieved fame. In terms of the value of his total production the work must be written off as a youthful and unfortunate caprice. It is a rather poor effort which suffers from most of the excesses of its type (the late Romantic folletin) and so is completely unworthy of the great esthetic sensitivity which marked his subsequent efforts. Yet it has historic interest precisely because of its shortcomings. In 1888, just one year later, Dario was to publish Azul, whose stories marked a new aesthetic departure.