To Roosevelt

Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, often cited as one of the most important precursors of 20th century Latin American literature, wrote this poem in 1905. An open letter to the U.S. president of the time, the poem is almost prophetic in its description of the interventionist approach that successive U.S. governments would take in Latin America in the century that followed, and also presents a mythologized portrait of Latin America that would inform the ideology of many of the continent’s anti-imperialist revolutions. In many respects, the poem is as relevant today in its presentation of U.S.-Latin American relations as it was when it was written 105 years ago.

It is a voice from the Bible, or the verse of Walt Whitman,
that I would need to reach you, Great Hunter,
primitive and modern, simple and complex,
with a dash of Washington and a strong dose of Nimrod.

You are the United States,
you are the future invader
of the ingenuous America with indigenous blood,
that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks Spanish.

You are the proud and strong model for your people;
you are learned, you are skilled; in opposition to Tolstoy.
And breaking in horses, or murdering tigers,
you are an Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar.
(You are a professor of Energy,
so say the madmen of today.)

You think that life is wild fire,
that progress is eruption,
that where you fire the bullet
you hit the future.
No.

The United States are big and mighty.
When they shudder, a deep trembling
passes down the enormous spine of the Andes.
If you cry out, the sound is like a lion’s roar.
As Hugo once told Grant, the stars are yours.
(Only just dawning now, the Argentine sun rises
and the Chilean star climbs the sky…) You are rich.
You unite the cult of Hercules with the cult of Mammon,
and lighting the way toward the easy conquest,
Liberty lifts up its torch in New York.

But our America, which has had poets
since the ancient days of Netzahualcoyotl,
which has preserved the footprints of the great Bacchus,
which in a time past learned the alphabet of Pan;
which consulted the starts, which knew Atlantis
whose name comes down to us resounding in Plato,
which since the earliest moments of its life
has lived on light, on fire, on perfume, on love,
the America of the great Moctezuma, of the Inca,
the fragrant America of Christopher Columbus,
the Catholic America, the Spanish America,
the America where the noble Cuauhtemoc said:
“I am not lain upon a bed of roses”; that America
that is shaken by hurricanes and lives on love,
Saxon-eyed men with barbarous souls, it lives.
And dreams. And loves, and throbs and is the daughter of the Sun.
Beware. Spanish America lives!
A thousand cubs of the Spanish Lion are set loose.
It would take, Roosevelt, by God’s own grace,
the most dreaded Soldier and the mightiest Hunter,
to hold us in your iron claws.

And, for all you have, one thing is lacking: God!

Translated by Martin Boyd