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Songs of Life and Hope/Cantos de vida y esperanza.

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Ruben Dario, Songs of Life and Hope/Cantos de vida y esperanza. Ed. and Trans. Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 262 pp.

As Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda elaborate in their extensive introduction to this book, the poetry of Nicaraguan Ruben Dario (1867-1916) presents, in a single package, all of the most nettlesome problems that can confront the translator. On one hand, Dario's fundamental importance to Latin American letters, and his impact on poetry in Spanish, demands a translation that is accessible to anyone with the remotest interest in Latin American culture. Such potential readers should include, ideally, those who know little Spanish, have little experience with modernista poetry, and are not steeped in the political and cultural conflicts of the era. On the other hand, Dario's intense engagement with linguistic invention, literary history, and contemporary conflict are precisely what makes his poetry so intimidating to so many. Derusha and Acereda have achieved outstanding success at grappling with these difficulties to produce a translation of Dario's most respected work that is highly readable yet far from simplistic or transparent.

The volume is Dario's compendium of fifty-nine poems, all written around the turn of the last century, originally published in 1905. It is divided into three parts very unequal in length, comprising poems also extremely varied in length,...

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