Roque Dalton

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(Redirected from
Roque Dalton García
)
In this
Spanish name, the first or paternal surname
is Dalton and the second or maternal family name is García.
Roque Dalton
Roque Dalton, pictured in 1969
Roque Dalton (1969)
BornRoque Antonio Dalton García
(1935-05-14)14 May 1935
San Salvador, El Salvador
Died10 May 1975(1975-05-10) (aged 39)
San Salvador, El Salvador
Notable awardsCasa de las Américas (1969)
Central American Prize of Poetry (1956, 1958, 1959, 1964)
Hijo Meritísimo de El Salvador
SpouseAída Cañas
Children3
Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.

Roque Antonio Dalton García (14 May 1935 – 10 May 1975) was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, communist activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets. He wrote emotionally strong, sometimes sarcastic, and image-loaded works dealing with life, death, love, and politics.

He studied at the

National Autonomous University of Mexico. While in Chile, he began studying Marxism. Upon his return to El Salvador, he became a figure in local politics. He began writing poetry after helping found the University Literary Circle. He joined the Communist Party of El Salvador. He was imprisoned in 1959 and 1960 for inciting revolt during the presidency of José María Lemus
.

In 1961, he was exiled from El Salvador. He spent time in Mexico, Czechoslovakia, and Cuba, where most of his poetry was published. In Cuba, he received military training after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. After returning to El Salvador in 1965, he was arrested and interrogated by an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1969, he returned to Cuba and then Prague to work as correspondent for The International Review: Problems of Peace and Socialism. In the same year, he won the Poetry Prize Casa de las Américas for his book Taberna y otros lugares.

After leaving Cuba, Dalton became involved in El Salvador's civil war, joining the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) in 1973. In the ERP, he found himself in a serious internal dispute with leader Alejandro Rivas Mira, who had become an influential leader of the armed group. As a consequence of the dispute, the leadership of the ERP decided to execute him.[1]

He is remembered for his bohemian lifestyle and the jovial, irreverent personality reflected in his literary work, as well as his commitment to social causes in El Salvador.[2] His work is diverse, going beyond the influences of his Marxist beliefs. He is considered one of the most influential Salvadoran writers. Posthumously, he has received recognition as "Hijo Meritísimo" and "Poeta Meritísimo" by the Salvadoran government and an honorary doctorate degree from the Universidad de El Salvador.[3]

Early life and education

Dalton was the son of Winnall Dalton and María García Medrano. Winnall Dalton emigrated[clarification needed] to Mexico, and came to El Salvador in the early 1920s. Winnall Dalton married Aida Ulloa, and gaining control of his wife's large farm dedicated his life to agriculture. He survived an assassination attempt. The nurse who took care of Winnall Dalton in the Salvadoran hospital, María García Medrano, later gave birth to Roque Dalton. Her hard work and good luck allowed her to provide their children a high-quality education.

Roque graduated from

leftist students and attended lectures with the Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Around this time, he developed a great interest in socialism
.

When he returned to El Salvador, he was accepted by the law school of the

Universidad de El Salvador (UES), and in 1955 he and the Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo
founded Círculo Literario Universitario, which published some of Central America's most recognized literary figures.

Writing and political career

Roque Dalton and Cuban Fayad Jamís, in the newsroom of the newspaper Hoy in 1962.
Roque shaking hands with combatants during the conference of the people.
Roque Dalton and Álvaro Menen Desleal, in Santiago de Chile, as correspondents for the news program TELE-PERIÓDICO, the first television news program in El Salvador.

In 1961 he travelled to

1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising
and was living in exile in Prague.

In 1970, Roque Dalton had become a recognized figure in the Salvadoran left. He tried hard to become a revolutionary soldier, for which reason he participated in military training camps in Cuba several times. He once wrote, "Politics are taken up at the risk of life, or else you don't talk about it".

Roque Dalton (1937–75) was the major literary figure and an important political architect of the revolutionary movement in El Salvador. Dalton represents a new type of Latin American writer: no longer the genial 'fellow traveler' of the revolution, like Pablo Neruda, but rather the rank and file revolutionary activist for whom the intricate cabbala of clandestine struggle-pass- words, safe houses, escape routes, forged documents, sectarian squabbles- was as familiar as Parisian surrealism. A dangerous and difficult profession, in which the event that seals a writer's reputation is often precocious martyrdom. [4]: [74] 

When he felt properly trained as a

FPL, both his sons joined the FPL in the late 1970s. Roque Dalton's military career also included cooperation with Guatemalan revolutionaries in creating EGP
- Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor in English).

Assassination by the ERP

FMLN, and Rivas Mira hides behind plastic surgeries, which were paid with money obtained from the kidnapping and murder of the multi-millionaire Roberto Poma. The most commonly accepted version of facts suggests that Dalton was "mistakenly accused" of operating as an agent for the CIA
, the reason for which he was executed.

In 1975, he was back in El Salvador working in the underground. This was a difficult time for the revolutionary movement, and Dalton's own organization, the ERP, was torn by a bitter factional fight. Dalton criticized the organization's military adventurism and argued the need to build a mass base. Under circumstances that still remain obscure, he was accused of complicity with the CIA and assassinated by members of a rival faction of the ERP.[5]

Recent developments

Press conference of the Committee of Political Prisoners of El Salvador; left the son of Roque Dalton who sought justice for the murder of his father

On May 4, 2010, the magazine Contrapunto published an interview with Jorge Meléndez, at the time the director of Civil Protection, and known during the civil war as Commander Jonas. During the interview he said with respect to the murder, “I was there and know that which transpired there.” Although the comments by Tomás André, the correspondent for Contrapunto who conducted the interview are not known, the historical importance of the interview can be certainly discerned by the depth and extraordinary nature of the encounter that Melendez was well aware of the nature of the process that resulted in the assassination of Dalton and his friend Pancho. To those who knew the author, the answer by Roque Dalton to the statements by this man could be easily imagined. What is clear is that Roque Dalton would have not been displeased if anyone had then said that even now, the murderers are afraid of him, and that the accusations of CIA collaboration were then and now a simple after the fact excuse of a group of terrorists fully aware of the hideous nature of their acts. ("Yo, Roque Dalton", 2012).[6]

On January 7, 2012, the Fiscalía Nacional, prosecuting agency for the FMLN lead Salvadoran government, decree that the statute of limitations for the murder of Roque Dalton had expired. Juan José Dalton said of the act “Villalobos gave an interview where he states who made the decision to kill [my father]: Vladimir Rogel, [Jorge] Meléndez [y Villalobos]. That would be enough in any decent nation of this planet for a prosecutor to proceed.” El Salvador, not one of those places, instead printed a stamp with his effigy and declared his death a national tragedy.

Legacy

Dalton's writing includes almost 15 poetry collections, a novel, a personal testimony, and a play, as well as short stories, critiques, and essays on both literature and politics. Some of his poetry has been translated to English, French, Czech, Russian and Italian. According to Luis Melgar Brizuela, he had the greatest influence from 1967 until the end of the Salvadoran Civil War in 1992. This was especially the case in leftist literary and intellectual groups, among them the literary groups Piedra y Siglo, La Masacuata and Xibalbá, as well as in the content of the magazines Abra and Taller de Letras, published by

José Simeón Cañas Central American University, the Literary Supplement 3000 in the Diario Co Latino, Amate, and La Universidad.[7]

Trivia

Bibliography

Poetry

  • Mía junto a los pájaros, San Salvador,1957
  • La ventana en el rostro, México, 1961
  • El mar, La Habana, 1962
  • El turno del ofendido, La Habana, 1962
  • Los testimonios, La Habana, 1964
  • Poemas. Antología, San Salvador, 1968
  • Taberna y otros lugares, Premio Casa de las Américas, La Habana, 1969
  • Los pequeños infiernos, Barcelona, 1970
  • In Translation to English: "Small Hours of the Night", translated by Jonathan Cohen, James Graham, Ralph Nelson, Paul Pines, Hardie St. Martin and David Unger. Edited by Hardie St. Martin, Curbstone Press, 1997.

Essays

  • "César Vallejo", La Habana, 1963
  • "El intelectual y la sociedad", 1969
  • "¿Revolución en la revolución? y la crítica de la derecha", La Habana, 1970
  • "Un libro rojo para Lenin", La Habana, 1970
  • "Miguel Mármol y los sucesos de 1932 en El Salvador", 1972
  • "Las historias prohibidas del Pulgarcito", México, 1974
  • "El Salvador (monografia)" UCA Editores.

Fiction

Pobrecito poeta que era yo, San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1994, 2005

References

  1. ^ Dalton, Roque (12 July 2000). "Roque Dalton". Roque Dalton | Academy of American Poets. Retrieved 28 November 2016.
  2. ^ Hernández, David. "Roque Dalton Honoris Causa". www.laprensagrafica.com. La Prensa Gráfica. Retrieved 4 December 2016.
  3. ^ noticias.universia.com.sv. "Reconocimiento a Roque Dalton, el poeta salvadoreño más destacado de la época". Noticias Universia El Salvador. Retrieved 4 December 2016.
  4. ^ Beverley, John. “Poems: Roque Dalton, John Beverley, Edward Baker.” Social Text, No. 5 (Spring, 1982), pp. 74-85.
  5. ^ Beverley, 74.
  6. ^ J. Arturo Revelo, Yo, Roque Dalton(1d.ed.) (April 2012)
  7. ^ Hernández, David. "Roque Dalton Honoris Causa". www.laprensagrafica.com. La Prensa Gráfica. Retrieved 4 December 2016.
  8. ^ "Llamado A Los Poetas Y Artistas Del Audio Y Video".
  9. ^ Revelo, Arturo (10 May 2012), Yo, Roque Dalton

Other sources:

  • Consuelo Hernandez
    ."Las historias prohibidas: Una aritmetica del dolor vivisimo." Los otros Roques. Rafael Lara-Martínez and Dennis Seager, editors. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1999. pp. 33–53.
  • Joaquin Revelo."Yo, Roque Dalton y otras historias."

External links

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