Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman, Seven Stories Press, 2023
On Thursday, July 6, 2023, the inaugural day of Guatemala’s International Book Fair (FILGUA), the government of El Salvador requested organizers to exclude Salvadoran author Michelle Recinos’ Sustancia de hígado (F&G Editores) from the fair. The next day, online news outlet elfaro revealed that El Salvador’s ambassador in Guatemala had said, “It would’ve been an unpleasant thing for the government of El Salvador if this book had been a part of the fair.” Details are scarce, but presumably, this action was related to Michelle’s story Barberos en huelga, winner of the 2022 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, which openly criticizes sitting president Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs.
Hearing this, I can only imagine what Roque Dalton would have written about Bukele.
Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement.
Roque Dalton was born in El Salvador in 1935. Before turning thirty, he had also lived in Chile, the Soviet Union, and Mexico, and during that time, he met notable figures like the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, the Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo, and the Nicaraguan revolutionary Carlos Fonseca. Then, beginning 1961, he spent many years in exile in Mexico and Cuba, publishing extensively across Latin America. In 1973, he left Cuba using a pseudonym (Julio Delfos Marín), and flew to El Salvador to join the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP). For the next two years, he helped the ERP, writing a book called Poemas clandestinos in the meantime.
In 1975, Roque Dalton was murdered by his own comrades, and in 1977, Por la causa proletaria, the paper of the political party National Resistance, published Poemas clandestinos. This blazing book of poetry was first available in English in 1984, thanks to the late Jack Hirschman, and has now been reissued by Seven Stories Press as Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle.
In this collection, we’re immediately plunged into Dalton’s mindset: “Whatever his quality, his stature, his finesse, his creative capacity, his success, the poet can only be to the bourgeoisie: SERVANT, CLOWN or ENEMY”; and placed at the secret house he lived in: “Don’t be mistaken: we’re poets who write / from the clandestinity in which we live.” This line is a direct statement from Dalton’s personal experience leading a clandestine life; as writer, photographer, and academic Margaret Randall points out in her introduction: “(He) also knew he would continue writing poetry, but that he wouldn’t be able to do that under his own name. So he invented five poets: a woman and four men whose concerns and poetic styles addressed the concrete situation he found in his country.” The names of these five poets are Vilma Flores (a former law student turned textile worker), Timoteo Lúe (a law student born in Suchitoto), Jorge Cruz (a former student leader who “dedicates all his time to the work of the Christian-revolutionary conscience among rural workers”), Juan Zapata (a former sociology student and short story writer), and Luis Luna (a former student, and prolific poet, short story writer, and essayist). Stories is divided into five chapters, each “authored” by one of these fictional poets.
Dalton’s progressive, radical ideas are enduringly present at the forefront of his poems—but their concerns are varied. In “On the Profit Margin or the Boss Robs Every Worker Twice Over,” he argues for the rights of housewives while criticizing the carelessness and blatant misogyny of their partners. In “Statistics on Freedom,” he addresses the freedom of the press, but turns his attention to its cost; while he acknowledges the importance of free speech for a country like El Salvador, he still has his eyes on the lower class: “Freedom of the press for Salvadoran people costs 20 centavos a day counting only those who can read and have more than 20 centavos left over after eating barely enough to stay alive.” This overarching attention to daily survival rings through Dalton’s work, calling attention to the urgent concerns of daily life that are often buried under or overlooked by the slogans of revolution.
Throughout, Dalton appears as a speaker for the people, but he ultimately avoids taking a blindly populist position. In “The Cops and The Guards,” he remains critical of the police (“They always saw the people as a mass of backs running away as a field on which their clubs fell with hatred”), but also takes a swing at the status quo (“They too were once people but with the excuse of hunger and unemployment they accepted a weapon a club and a monthly salary to defend the makers of hunger and unemployment”). And, with particular sarcasm and his now-famous humor, he also condemns the higher ranks who control the police, using their own perverse voice against them:
(The colonels finished up by convincing them:
“That’s the way it is, guys—they said—
hard and to the heads of the civilians
fire on the rabble
you are uniformed pillars of the Nation
priests of the first rank
in the cult of the flag the shield the hymn the Fathers
representative democracy the official party the free world
whose sacrifices the decent people of this land won’t forget
though we can’t give you a raise today
though of course we’d like to.”)
This mimetic technique pervades as Dalton additionally takes on the voice of torturers in “The Certainty,” and Chile and El Salvador’s far-right in “Hitler Mazzini: Comparison Between Chile in 1974 and El Salvador in 1932,” where he writes:
It doesn’t surprise me that they slander
the Honorable Military Junta of Chile.
Communists are like that.
They say that in four months
the military killed
more than eighty thousand Chileans.
That’s an exaggeration
since the real facts
are the dead didn’t exceed
some forty thousand.
Compass and rifle. As a compass, Dalton directs our view. As a rifle, he aims furiously and intelligently at the dark forces that bound pre-war El Salvador. No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen as he courageously fights against plundering, capitalism, apathy, disinformation, absurdity, stupidity, and fascism. When faced with unethical acts, he even takes aim at the movement he himself is a part of—for example, in claiming that the “Salvadoran revolutionaries quit being ultraleftists and became as decent as the bourgeoisie.”
But despite his incisive and passionate tendencies, his effectiveness and clarity are in fact not limited to philosophy or ideology, but often rely on beauty and his masterful use of language. On page thirteen, for example, appears Third Poem of Love, a beautiful poem laced with hope and fragility:
Whoever tells you our love is extraordinary
because it was born of extraordinary circumstances
tell them we’re struggling precisely
so that a love like ours
(a love among comrades in combat)
becomes
the most ordinary and common
almost the only
love in El Salvador.
And the devastating elegance of “Poetic Art 1974”:
Poetry
Forgive me for having helped you understand
you’re not made of words alone.
Or the timeless “Advice That Is No Longer Necessary Anywhere in the World but Here in El Salvador…”:
Don’t ever forget
that the least fascist
among fascists
also are
fascists.
I must point out that this book is an unfinished, unedited manuscript. As Jaime Barba wrote in his introduction: “Had the author survived, he probably would have left out certain texts, added others, and even rewritten a good part of them. That was his practice as a responsible writer.” Nevertheless, Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle still carries much of the potency that we find throughout Dalton’s final years (1971-1975)—or what the Salvadoran writer and academic Luis Melgar Brizuela called El tercer Dalton: The third Dalton, when the poet became more radical and leaned more strongly on testimony. Dalton’s intensity throughout the collection is also reminiscent of other Central American poets who were politically active at the time, like his friend Otto René Castillo, Luis de Lión, Alaíde Foppa—three who sadly suffered similar fates to Dalton’s—and Ernesto Cardenal.
Translator Jack Hirschman has masterfully reproduced Dalton’s power, authority, and poetic sensibilities with precision and inventiveness. The poet’s unique humor, sarcasm, and wittiness are also there, albeit void of its characteristic Caliche dialect. And though I can think of lots of Salvadoran-American poets and authors who could’ve delivered an English rendition of these poems, I applaud the decision to keep such a faithful and seismic translation, and remain hopeful for the upcoming Roque Dalton publications from Seven Stories; Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle is the first of seven books by Roque Dalton that the press will publish in the upcoming years.
Roque Dalton was killed forty-eight years ago, yet his legacy and influence remain untouched. At a time when Nayib Bukele has been named once again as a 2024 presidential candidate despite a constitutional ban; at a time when Xiomara Castro, the president of Honduras, has copied Bukele’s tactics against gangs; at a time when Nicaragua’s dictator Daniel Ortega has stripped close to a hundred Nicaraguan dissidents of their citizenship; at a time when conservative leaders have tried repeatedly to hinder the elections in Guatemala and keep progressive candidate Bernardo Arévalo from running for president, Roque Dalton’s poetry remains a source of solace, refuge, and inspiration.
José García Escobar is a journalist, fiction writer, translator, and former Fulbright scholar from Guatemala. He got his MFA in creative writing from The New School. His writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Guernica, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He’s a two-time Dart Center fellow. He is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Central American region. He writes in English and Spanish, and has translated into Spanish Solito by Javier Zamora and I’m Not Broken by Jesse Leon, both for Penguin En Español.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
Compass and Rifle: On Roque Dalton’s Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle
No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen . . .
Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman, Seven Stories Press, 2023
On Thursday, July 6, 2023, the inaugural day of Guatemala’s International Book Fair (FILGUA), the government of El Salvador requested organizers to exclude Salvadoran author Michelle Recinos’ Sustancia de hígado (F&G Editores) from the fair. The next day, online news outlet elfaro revealed that El Salvador’s ambassador in Guatemala had said, “It would’ve been an unpleasant thing for the government of El Salvador if this book had been a part of the fair.” Details are scarce, but presumably, this action was related to Michelle’s story Barberos en huelga, winner of the 2022 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, which openly criticizes sitting president Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs.
Hearing this, I can only imagine what Roque Dalton would have written about Bukele.
Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement.
Roque Dalton was born in El Salvador in 1935. Before turning thirty, he had also lived in Chile, the Soviet Union, and Mexico, and during that time, he met notable figures like the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, the Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo, and the Nicaraguan revolutionary Carlos Fonseca. Then, beginning 1961, he spent many years in exile in Mexico and Cuba, publishing extensively across Latin America. In 1973, he left Cuba using a pseudonym (Julio Delfos Marín), and flew to El Salvador to join the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP). For the next two years, he helped the ERP, writing a book called Poemas clandestinos in the meantime.
In 1975, Roque Dalton was murdered by his own comrades, and in 1977, Por la causa proletaria, the paper of the political party National Resistance, published Poemas clandestinos. This blazing book of poetry was first available in English in 1984, thanks to the late Jack Hirschman, and has now been reissued by Seven Stories Press as Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle.
In this collection, we’re immediately plunged into Dalton’s mindset: “Whatever his quality, his stature, his finesse, his creative capacity, his success, the poet can only be to the bourgeoisie: SERVANT, CLOWN or ENEMY”; and placed at the secret house he lived in: “Don’t be mistaken: we’re poets who write / from the clandestinity in which we live.” This line is a direct statement from Dalton’s personal experience leading a clandestine life; as writer, photographer, and academic Margaret Randall points out in her introduction: “(He) also knew he would continue writing poetry, but that he wouldn’t be able to do that under his own name. So he invented five poets: a woman and four men whose concerns and poetic styles addressed the concrete situation he found in his country.” The names of these five poets are Vilma Flores (a former law student turned textile worker), Timoteo Lúe (a law student born in Suchitoto), Jorge Cruz (a former student leader who “dedicates all his time to the work of the Christian-revolutionary conscience among rural workers”), Juan Zapata (a former sociology student and short story writer), and Luis Luna (a former student, and prolific poet, short story writer, and essayist). Stories is divided into five chapters, each “authored” by one of these fictional poets.
Dalton’s progressive, radical ideas are enduringly present at the forefront of his poems—but their concerns are varied. In “On the Profit Margin or the Boss Robs Every Worker Twice Over,” he argues for the rights of housewives while criticizing the carelessness and blatant misogyny of their partners. In “Statistics on Freedom,” he addresses the freedom of the press, but turns his attention to its cost; while he acknowledges the importance of free speech for a country like El Salvador, he still has his eyes on the lower class: “Freedom of the press for Salvadoran people costs 20 centavos a day counting only those who can read and have more than 20 centavos left over after eating barely enough to stay alive.” This overarching attention to daily survival rings through Dalton’s work, calling attention to the urgent concerns of daily life that are often buried under or overlooked by the slogans of revolution.
Throughout, Dalton appears as a speaker for the people, but he ultimately avoids taking a blindly populist position. In “The Cops and The Guards,” he remains critical of the police (“They always saw the people as a mass of backs running away as a field on which their clubs fell with hatred”), but also takes a swing at the status quo (“They too were once people but with the excuse of hunger and unemployment they accepted a weapon a club and a monthly salary to defend the makers of hunger and unemployment”). And, with particular sarcasm and his now-famous humor, he also condemns the higher ranks who control the police, using their own perverse voice against them:
This mimetic technique pervades as Dalton additionally takes on the voice of torturers in “The Certainty,” and Chile and El Salvador’s far-right in “Hitler Mazzini: Comparison Between Chile in 1974 and El Salvador in 1932,” where he writes:
Compass and rifle. As a compass, Dalton directs our view. As a rifle, he aims furiously and intelligently at the dark forces that bound pre-war El Salvador. No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen as he courageously fights against plundering, capitalism, apathy, disinformation, absurdity, stupidity, and fascism. When faced with unethical acts, he even takes aim at the movement he himself is a part of—for example, in claiming that the “Salvadoran revolutionaries quit being ultraleftists and became as decent as the bourgeoisie.”
But despite his incisive and passionate tendencies, his effectiveness and clarity are in fact not limited to philosophy or ideology, but often rely on beauty and his masterful use of language. On page thirteen, for example, appears Third Poem of Love, a beautiful poem laced with hope and fragility:
And the devastating elegance of “Poetic Art 1974”:
Or the timeless “Advice That Is No Longer Necessary Anywhere in the World but Here in El Salvador…”:
I must point out that this book is an unfinished, unedited manuscript. As Jaime Barba wrote in his introduction: “Had the author survived, he probably would have left out certain texts, added others, and even rewritten a good part of them. That was his practice as a responsible writer.” Nevertheless, Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle still carries much of the potency that we find throughout Dalton’s final years (1971-1975)—or what the Salvadoran writer and academic Luis Melgar Brizuela called El tercer Dalton: The third Dalton, when the poet became more radical and leaned more strongly on testimony. Dalton’s intensity throughout the collection is also reminiscent of other Central American poets who were politically active at the time, like his friend Otto René Castillo, Luis de Lión, Alaíde Foppa—three who sadly suffered similar fates to Dalton’s—and Ernesto Cardenal.
Translator Jack Hirschman has masterfully reproduced Dalton’s power, authority, and poetic sensibilities with precision and inventiveness. The poet’s unique humor, sarcasm, and wittiness are also there, albeit void of its characteristic Caliche dialect. And though I can think of lots of Salvadoran-American poets and authors who could’ve delivered an English rendition of these poems, I applaud the decision to keep such a faithful and seismic translation, and remain hopeful for the upcoming Roque Dalton publications from Seven Stories; Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle is the first of seven books by Roque Dalton that the press will publish in the upcoming years.
Roque Dalton was killed forty-eight years ago, yet his legacy and influence remain untouched. At a time when Nayib Bukele has been named once again as a 2024 presidential candidate despite a constitutional ban; at a time when Xiomara Castro, the president of Honduras, has copied Bukele’s tactics against gangs; at a time when Nicaragua’s dictator Daniel Ortega has stripped close to a hundred Nicaraguan dissidents of their citizenship; at a time when conservative leaders have tried repeatedly to hinder the elections in Guatemala and keep progressive candidate Bernardo Arévalo from running for president, Roque Dalton’s poetry remains a source of solace, refuge, and inspiration.
José García Escobar is a journalist, fiction writer, translator, and former Fulbright scholar from Guatemala. He got his MFA in creative writing from The New School. His writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Guernica, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He’s a two-time Dart Center fellow. He is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Central American region. He writes in English and Spanish, and has translated into Spanish Solito by Javier Zamora and I’m Not Broken by Jesse Leon, both for Penguin En Español.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
Contributor:- José García Escobar
; Language: - Spanish
; Place: - El Salvador
; Writers: - Alaíde Foppa
, - Carlos Fonseca
, - Ernesto Cardenal
, - Jack Hirschman
, - Jaime Barba
, - Julio Delfos Marín
, - Luis de Lión
, - Luis Melgar Brizuela
, - Margaret Randall
, - Michelle Recinos
, - Otto René Castillo
, - Roque Dalton
; Tags: - authoritarianism
, - Central American literature
, - class struggle
, - elfaro
, - F&G Editores
, - fascism
, - FILGUA
, - Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize
, - Salvadoran literature
, - Salvadoran poetry
, - Seven Stories Press
, - social commentary
, - social critique
, - state violence