LEER A TRAVÉS: LO SHAKESPEARIANO COMO FORMA DE AFRANCESAMIENTO EN RUBÉN DARÍO

Rubén Darío is in constant dialogue with the work of William Shakespeare. The dramas of the Swan of Stratford reach him not only through Spanish translations, but also through a French mediation that recent criticism has highlighted on various occasions. The characteristic "Frenchness" of Spanish-American Modernism is, in reality, a much more complex and kaleidoscopic influence. France is not only the model for a certain lifestyle or artistic sensibility, but it also serves as a bridge for many translated foreign texts. Rubén Darío adopts a certain Anglophilia from Victor Hugo, who wrote William Shakespeare (1864) during his exile, though he is not the only source. As early as 1934, Marasso hypothesized possible French sources for some apparently Anglo-Saxon elements in Darío's work. The discoveries of Günther Schmigalle (2020) and Carmen Márquez Martín (2022) point toward this same conclusion. What if Rubén Darío's interest in Shakespeare were also part of his "Frenchness"? What if Shakespeare were recovered not as a canonical author, but as another one of the "raros" (the eccentric or rare ones)? This chapter seeks to reflect on certain aspects of Darío's cosmopolitanism and Frenchness, raising questions to rethink an omnivorous Modernism well before the avant-garde movements.