The Gift

What better place for those writings by Darío than the Republic of Venezuela, the homeland of Simón Bolívar? I’m sure that Rubén is happy at this moment; up in heaven, he is happy.
Daniel Ortega

What law, what reason can deny that gift so sweet, so natural that God has given a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird?
Pedro Calderón de la Barca


How would Americans feel if President Bush gave away, as a gift, an original manuscript of an Emily Dickenson poem, written by her own hand, to, say, Tony Blair? I suspect the President’s gesture wouldn’t be too well received.

Something like this has happened in Nicaragua.

Rubén Darío—born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento—is, to date, the only quantifiable genius born on Nicaraguan soil. He is, and I’m not exaggerating here, God’s gift to Nicaraguan national identity. Virtually every community—city, town, and village—has a monument in his honor. What’s more, Rubén Darío’s face graces the hundred córdoba bill, the nation’s most common monetary denomination.

Because in Nicaragua he is worshipped, one finds Rubén Darío everywhere.

This literary genius lived and breathed poetry, and he had the remarkable capacity to remember every single word of every single book he read. (As a young adult he worked for several months in the Nicaraguan National Library and he read every volume of the collection.) Moreover, throughout his entire life Darío was in the habit of reading the Spanish dictionary, claiming that this helped him learn his language intimately.

When Darío was still a boy, the cultural elite of León—the city where he was raised—recognized his extraordinary poetic talents. And at the age of fifteen, the Nicaraguan government provided the adolescent with a scholarship to study in El Salvador under the poet Francisco Gavidia because the youth’s knowledge of poetry already surpassed that of any teacher in Nicaragua.

From this point on, Rubén Darío lived a nomadic life and his prestige as a poet and writer grew as he traveled throughout the Americas and Europe. And in the ensuing years the Nicaraguan would revolutionize Spanish-language poetry. In fact, Rubén Darío founded the first autonomous Latin American literary movement: el modernismo. And in the process of setting the course for the future of Hispanic letters, he wrested away four centuries of literary dominance from Spain. As a result, the Nicaraguan’s vital contribution to Spanish-language literature is unquestioned, and his influence is felt, still today, far beyond the borders of his small country.

Recently, Rubén Darío’s name appeared prominently in the international press when Daniel Ortega, only a few weeks after his inauguration as president, presented Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s maverick leader, with the original manuscripts of two poems that commemorate Simón Bolívar.

This gift has angered many Nicaraguans. They claim that these documents are part of their patrimony, and as such they’re a national treasure that should not be given away. In a recent poll conducted by La Prensa, 91.8% of respondents stated their opposition to President Ortega’s gift. Admittedly, readers of this conservative newspaper tend to be anti-Sandinistas, but I suspect that in the results of an independent poll wouldn’t yield a much lower rate of disapproval.

(And President Ortega has not taken the criticism of his compatriots with stoicism. On March 26, he fired Margine Gutiérrez, the Director of the Instituto Nicaragüense de Cultura, because in an interview she had hinted at her disapproval of the gift.)

There are other ways in which Daniel Ortega could have honored his Venezuelan cohort. For the Nicaraguan’s inauguration, Chávez presented Ortega with an replica of the sword Simón Bolívar had at his side while he liberated South America from Spanish rule. Perhaps, then, Ortega could have offered stunning replicas of Rubén Darío’s manuscripts, finely etched in stone, or glass.

Without a doubt—at least in my mind—Rubén Darío’s manuscripts were never President Ortega’s to give away. In the same way that Emily Dickinson’s originals belong to the people of the United States, Darío’s manuscripts belong to all Nicaraguans. After all, when Rubén Darío was born in the small village of Metapa, God saw fit to bless Nicaragua with its one true genius. And this, fortunately, is a gift that can never be given away.