A Rosario Murillo, 1912 October

This collection consists of approximately 900 handwritten pages of poetry, essays, short stories, diplomatic memos, and personal letters created by Rubén Darío between 1882 and 1915. Many of the manuscripts are transcripts of original documents written in Darío's hand.

Series I: Correspondence contains correspondence from Darío to political figures, renowned writers, and family members and is organized by date. Darío wrote several of the letters during his time as Nicaragua's Ambassador to Spain under the presidency of José Santos Zelaya, who was the recipient of several of the documents. Other letters are addressed to Darío's romantic partner, Francisca Sánchez. Ten of the letters are directed to Mexican poet Amado Nervo (1870-1919). Other recipients include Emilio de Arriaga, Pedro Balmaceda Toro, Ernesto Bermúdez, Luis Bonafoux, Francisco Castro, Benigno Díez Salcedo, Rodolfo Espinosa, Fermín Estrella, Vicente Gasset, and Crisanto Medina.

Series II: Receipts and Bank Records houses receipts to and from various individuals. Two of the receipts detail payments received by Darío for written works. Series III: Documents in French includes documents detailing bank transactions. Two items in Series III (Box 2, Folder 10 and Box 2, Folder 14) were found to have been classified incorrectly after reformatting was complete. These documents were removed to Series II but the box and folder numbers were not changed in order to maintain the connection between the original documents and their digital surrogates.

Series IV: Poetry and Creative Works is the largest series in the collection. It contains poetry and other creative works written by Darío and is organized alphabetically. Several of the documents are what Darío called faithful transcriptions of works published. Handwritten notations on some of the manuscripts detail the specific dates, locations, and dedications of particular works. In some cases, multiple versions of a single work are included. For example, the collection contains two distinct versions of Los motivos del lobo (1913) and three versions of Sonatina, one of which is written in English.

Series V: Collection History consists of documents relevant to the provenance of the collection, including a newspaper clipping that contains the obituary for Alejandro Bermúdez, Rubén Darío's personal secretary. Series VI: Restricted Materials consists of a single box of manuscripts restricted for security reasons. Photocopies of these items have been placed in the collection for research use.

The origination of some of these papers has been questioned in journalistic reports. The most recent scholarly evaluation of which we are aware is that of José María Martínez in 2013, published in Siglo Diecinueve (https://doi.org/10.37677/sigloxix.vi19.105). We welcome visitors who wish to examine the collection under our customary procedures.