"Nicaraguan Words": José Coronel, the Vanguardia, and Whitman's "Language Experiment"

IN A 1953 memoir, Jose Coronel Urtecho, the founder of the Nicaraguan avant-garde, recalls the shock of a US visitor who noticed a portrait of Walt Whitman in Coronel's isolated estate along the San Juan River, near the border of Costa Rica. Coronel wrote that for his Yankee guest to find Whitman in rural Nicaragua "surprised him as much as finding a caiman on Beacon Street or a tapir grazing tranquilly in Boston Common."1 Coronel's surreal language frames a strange, exotic-animal Walt who can somehow nonetheless (notice that he is "grazing tranquilly") be calmly and easily translated into any new context (Rapido 27). Indeed, the relations between the US and Latin America, of which this portrait-encounter represents an intriguing instance, have often been shaped by both this mutual exotic fascination and by countless literary and cultural translations, intersections, and crosscurrents.2What was Whitman doing in Nicaragua? In fact, US and Nicaraguan histories have been inextricably linked since the mid-nineteenth century, when traffic from the California Gold Rush (1848- 1855) across Nicaragua's short inter-oceanic route brought a sudden influx of US capital and culture.3 Later in the 1850s, Tennessee filibuster William Walker took advantage of civil war in Nicaragua to seize power and become-in one of the stranger moments in US history-president of Nicaragua until he was expelled by a Central American coalition. By the early twentieth century, a painful contradiction lay at the heart of Nicaraguan culture: Michele Gobat persuasively argues that while Nicaragua sought to imitate the prosperity and power of the US, many Nicaraguans fiercely resented the United States' frequent military, cultural, and financial interventions into their national affairs.4 And in fact, Jose Coronel himself evinced a conflicted attitude, writing: "My personal attitude towards the United States was for many years ambivalent: I found myself attracted, I would almost say fascinated, and at the same time repelled by them."5But if US involvement in Nicaragua repelled Coronel, US literature had attracted him from a very early age. Having as a child first encountered Whitman in Spanish translation and then in Whitman's native tongue, Coronel once claimed, "I can almost say that I learned to read English reading Poe and Whitman" (Rapido 51).6 From 1924 to 1927, while many of his peers went to Europe, the young Coronel chose to live and study in San Francisco, California, where he immersed himself in US literature. When he returned, however, he founded an avant-garde movement that vocally denounced the continued US intervention in Nicaragua, and called for the creation of an authentic, autochthonous Nicaraguan literature and culture. Yet despite this agenda, Coronel's Vanguardia, as it came to be called, remained strongly (and paradoxically) permeated by US literary culture, for Coronel had begun what would be a lifetime of serious engagement with US writers, with Walt Whitman occupying a prominent place.Indeed, among Latin American avant-garde writers, Jose Coronel stands out for his depth of reading in Whitman's work. As a poet and a translator, Coronel knew Leaves of Grass, and anthologized poems from it in three different collections.7 Yet few scholars have studied this long trans-continental literary relationship.8 So what did Coronel find compelling in Whitman's work? At stake here is not only an accurate vision of hemispheric literary history, but also an understanding of the real overlap between aesthetics and politics in twentieth-century US-Nicaraguan relations, because the texts of Coronel's group, and the politics of its members, would seriously impact the course of Nicaraguan literature and history. A reading of Coronel's later writings on Whitman, alongside the texts of his Vanguardia, reveals Whitman's presence, as the Nicaraguan avant-garde forged a nationalist, autochthonous literature that sought at the same time to be aesthetically new. …