Poemas Clandestinos

Dalton was one of the most influential poets and political writers in Latin America. In this book, written just before his assassination, he invents five poets who express their different concerns about the oppressive situation in El Salvador.

Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases fue el título original del libro que ahora conocemos como Poemas clandestinos. Ninguno de los poemas aparece firmado por Roque Dalton, sino firmados por Vilma Flores, Timoteo Lúe, Jorge Cruz, Juan Zapata y Luis Luna. Más que seudónimos, son heterónimos, como los de Fernando Pessoa, pues cada uno de «los autores» tiene una biografía propia. El denominador común es que todos habían pasado por las aulas universitarias. De alguna forma, eso significaba afirmar que, para Dalton, el sujeto de la revolución en El Salvador no sería un etéreo «proletariado» —descontextualizándose así el producto del análisis de Marx, quien tenía en el horizonte de sus preocupaciones a la sociedad capitalista industrial de fines del siglo XIX, en concreto, a Inglaterra, esa sociedad inglesa industrial cuyos bajos fondos retrata magistralmente el Oliver Twist de Dickens—, sino que provendría de la pequeña burguesía, los estudiantes y los intelectuales, pero adoptando el proyecto histórico y los valores éticos de las mayorías populares como suyos. «La pequeña burguesía» es el título de uno de los poemas, donde el autor advierte sobre lo que ocurre cuando este sector quiere transformar la sociedad desentendiéndose del dolor de las mayorías populares, de tal suerte que hacer la revolución se convierte en un acto frívolo... Para un intelectual, pero sobre todo si ese intelectual es poeta, ¿cómo debe hacerse la revolución? En opinión de Roque Dalton, el poeta revolucionario debe poner en función del proyecto histórico transforma-dor no sólo su participación en organizaciones políticas y el trabajo conocido tradicionalmente como intelectual, sino también la poesía misma, razón del ser poeta. Pero la Modernidad ha situado a la poesía y, por extensión, a la estética, fuera del «mundo de la vida», es decir, del mundo cotidiano. ¿Qué hacer?

“The revolutionary the dictatorship couldn’t kill, the trickster poet favored by the gods.” —Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to Spring: Life and Death in Palestine Poems of revolution by one of Latin America’s most beloved poets One of Latin America’s greatest poets, Roque Dalton was a revolutionary whose politics were inseparable from his art. Born in El Salvador in 1935, Dalton dedicated his life to fighting for social justice, while writing fierce, tender poems about his country and its people. In Poemas clandestinos / Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, he explores oppression and resistance through the lens of five poetic personas, each with their own distinct voice. These poems show a country caught in the crosshairs of American imperialism, where the few rule the many and the many struggle to survive—and yet there is joy and even humor to be found here, as well as an abiding faith in humanity. In striking, immediate, exuberantly inventive language, Dalton captures the ethos of a people, as stirring now as when the book was first published nearly forty years ago. “I believe the world is beautiful,” he writes, “and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”

A comprehensive, encyclopedic guide to the authors, works, and topics crucial to the literature of Central and South America and the Caribbean, the Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature includes over 400 entries written by experts in the field of Latin American studies. Most entries are of 1500 words but the encyclopedia also includes survey articles of up to 10,000 words on the literature of individual countries, of the colonial period, and of ethnic minorities, including the Hispanic communities in the United States. Besides presenting and illuminating the traditional canon, the encyclopedia also stresses the contribution made by women authors and by contemporary writers. Outstanding Reference Source Outstanding Reference Book

A comprehensive, encyclopedic guide to the authors, works, and topics crucial to the literature of Central and South America and the Caribbean, the Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature includes over 400 entries written by experts in the field of Latin American studies. Most entries are of 1500 words but the encyclopedia also includes survey articles of up to 10,000 words on the literature of individual countries, of the colonial period, and of ethnic minorities, including the Hispanic communities in the United States. Besides presenting and illuminating the traditional canon, the encyclopedia also stresses the contribution made by women authors and by contemporary writers. Outstanding Reference Source Outstanding Reference Book

“This book began in what seemed like a counterfactual intuition . . . that what had been happening in Nicaraguan poetry was essential to the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution,” write John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman. “In our own postmodern North American culture, we are long past thinking of literature as mattering much at all in the ‘real’ world, so how could this be?” This study sets out to answer that question by showing how literature has been an agent of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The book begins by discussing theory about the relationship between literature, ideology, and politics, and charts the development of a regional system of political poetry beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in late twentieth-century writers. In this context, Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, Roque Dalton of El Salvador, and Otto René Castillo of Guatemala are among the poets who receive detailed attention.