Clandestine Poems/Poemas Clandestinos

by Roque Dalton, Barbara Paschke (Editor), Jack Hirschman (Translator)

These Clandestine Poems, written in the voices of five imaginary poets, deliver their political insights with biting humor, strength and tenderness. They are the poems of a worker and fighter, filled with courage, who loved life and hated oppression.

Genres: Poetry, Politics

183 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Roque Dalton was born on May 14, 1935, in San Salvador, El Salvador. His father was one of the members of the outlaw Dalton brothers and his mother was a registered nurse whose salary supported the family. After a year at the University of Santiago, Chile, Roque Dalton attended the University of San Salvador in 1956, where he helped found the University Literary Circle just before the Salvadoran military set fire to the building. The following year he joined the Communist Party; he was arrested in 1959 and 1960 for inciting students and peasants to revolt against the landowners. Dalton was sentenced to be executed, but his life was saved the day before his sentence was to be carried out, when the dictatorship of Colonel José María Lemus was overthrown. He spent 1961 in Mexican exile, writing many of the poems that were published in La Ventana en el rostro ("The Window in My Face," 1961) and El turno del ofendido ("The Injured Party's Turn," 1962). He dedicated the latter book to the Salvadoran police chief who had filed the charges against him.

From Mexico, Dalton naturally gravitated to Cuba, where he was well received by the Cuban and Latin American exiled writers who gathered in the Casa de las Américas. From that point on, starting with La Ventana en el rostro and El Mar ("The Sea") in 1962, almost all of his poetic work was published in Cuba. In the summer of 1965, he returned to El Salvador to continue his political work. Two months after his arrival, he was arrested, tortured, and again sentenced to execution. However, he managed to escape death once more when an earthquake shattered the outer wall of his cell, enabling him to dig his way out through the rubble.

He returned to Cuba and a few months later the Communist Party sent him to Prague as a correspondent for The International Review: Problems of Peace and Socialism. His book Taberna y ostros lugares ("Tavern and Other Places"), reflecting his long stay in Prague, won the Casa de las Américas poetry prize in 1969 and established Roque Dalton, at the age of thirty-four, as one of the best young poets in Latin America. In 1975, a military faction of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), unjustly accused him of trying to divide their organization and condemned him to death. They executed him on May 10, 1975, four days before his fortieth birthday.

Reviews

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of like Nazi Literature in the Americas in reverse--Dalton writes as a disparate group of leftist poets with brief biographical sketches and differing aesthetic orientations in the guise of an anthology of Salvadoran revolutionary poetry. On top of this, I'm sure it gave him great pleasure as he lived as an underground guerrilla in convincing the Salvadoran army of the existence of non-existent Leftist intellectuals—multiplying the anxiety for them (and the CIA) in trying to stamp out all Communist sympathy and power bases. Despite the largely propogandistic aesthetic orientation of the 'poets' presented, there are some beautiful moments, and as for the more heavy-handed, how can you blame Dalton for writing in shades of poetic character? Even its propagandistic zeal comes off with the Mayakovskian bent for bombast, so though at times didactic it doesn't lapse into the realm of the boring.

Here is one of the more ambiguous and strange poems that comes in close to the end of the anthology, and it seems to come out of the previous work of Dalton with more imagery and strangeness than the rest of the collection:

ENCUENTRO CON UN POETA VIEJO

Ayer vine a toparme cara a cara
con el hombre que antes que nadie aplaudió mi poesía.
Él fue el responsable de que mis versos
encontraran el cauce de los periódicos y las editoriales
y de que se comenzara a hablar de ellos
en forma que parecía necesitar una iniciación.
Ayer vine a toparme cara a cara con él
muy cerca de los mercados pestíferos
(supongo que él dejaba su oficina e iba a casa).
Yo venía sonriendo para mí mismo
porque unos minutos antes todo había salido bien
y no hubo necesidad para nosotros
de usar las armas.
Él palideció bajo la luz roja de neón (una proeza)
y buscó la otra acera como quien repentinamente tiene sed.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I'm listening to a rector's talk
here in the university
(grey cops are at every door
contributing to the culture),
nauseous till I'm pale, I remember
the sad peace of my native poverty,
the sweet sluggishness with which everything dies in my town.

My father is waiting there.
I came to study
the architecture of justice,
the anatomy of reason,
looking for answers
to the enormous helplessness and thirst.

Oh night of fake lights,
glitter made of obscurity:
where should I run
other than to my own soul,
the soul that wanted to be a flag returning
and which they want to transform into a despicable rag
in this temple of merchants?

[Alex Reséndiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un gran ejemplo de la resistencia en la poesía.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 5 out of 5]

A most relevant collection of poems written under five pseudonyms while underground by El Salvadoran revolutionary and martyr Roque Dalton. Declaring that a poet can only be either a servant, clown, or enemy to the exploiting classes, Dalton sharply defines himself as an enemy poet “who claims his wages not in flattery or dollars but in persecutions, prisons, bullets.” At times irreverent, at times agitating, and at times sentimental, his poems serve to show how poetry is “not made of words alone” (Poetic Art 1974).

[Adrià Ibáñez Pelegrí · Rating 5 out of 5]

[…] que la diferencia de sexos / brilla mucho mejor en la profunda noche amorosa / cuando se conocen todos esos secretos / que nos mantenían enmascarados y ajenos.


<3 leído en clase de poesía latinoamericana con Eva Castañeda <3

[Ashly · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Yo vine a estudiar
la arquitectura de la justicia
la anatomía de la razón
a buscar las respuestas,
para el enorme desamparo y la sed."-Roque Dalton

[María Paz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"por los siglos de los siglos
nunca más."

[Gonzalo Pedreros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poemas para no sucumbir ante el neoliberalismo, la derecha y la incertidumbre de las elecciones.

No olvides nunca
que los menos fascistas
de entre los fascistas
también son fascistas.

[Jessica]

I read this when I was attempting to know my own history, where and why I migrated to the U.S....this helped me to understand the urgency of the revolutionaries that came before me....

Roque's cynical, humorous, critical and intelligent style influences me today......his work is a CARCAJA CON LAGRIMAS, strong laughter with tears...

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Passionate, angry, sometimes tender book. Resistance literature in the truest and best sense.

[Grass · Rating 5 out of 5]

on that revolutionary tip...

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. I get it. I appreciate the politics. The poetry, however, with a few rad exceptions, didn't do it for me.