Not Words Alone

It’s unlikely that any Writers Guild of America strikers carry signs that say “For the producer, the writer can be only SERVANT, CLOWN, or ENEMY.” But that phrase, adapted from Roque Dalton’s “Declaration of Principles”—which speaks of “the bourgeoisie” and “the poet” rather than producers and writers—probably rings true to lots of people on picket lines right now. Those who take action in the streets to defend their livelihoods and humanity against never-wealthy-enough corporate overlords bent on using text regurgitation machines to replace people and further enrich themselves have some common cause with the anti-capitalist revolutionary who wrote “Poetry / Forgive me for having helped you understand / you’re not made of words alone.”

The “Declaration of Principles” prefaces Dalton’s final project, the Poemas clandestinos, composed after his return to El Salvador in December 1973, following a decade’s exile in Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, and Cuba. He went back to join the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), a group of armed militants who later became part of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in the Salvadoran Civil War. In preparation, Dalton had his face altered—perhaps, the writer Horacio Castellanos Moya suggests, by the same Cuban plastic surgeon who worked on Che Guevara before he left for Bolivia—and took a new name, Julio Delfos Marín.

It would have been even more suicidal for him to return under his real name to the native land where he’d served several jail sentences for sedition and where simply to possess a book by Roque Dalton was risky. The writer Roberto Lovato, born in California, remembers a childhood visit to El Salvador when he watched his cousin dig a hole next to a wall in his backyard to disinter a plastic bag that held some of Dalton’s poems. The neighbor on the other side was a police officer involved in one of the paramilitary death squads that executed tens of thousands of Salvadorans during the Civil War between 1979 and 1992.

Living under a fake identity must have drawn Dalton to the idea of heteronyms. For the Poemas clandestinos, he adopted the Pessoa-like stratagem of writing as five different poets, one of them a woman. A terse bio at the start of each section gives the poet’s year of birth. Dalton was born in 1935, and all the personae he took on were much younger. Maybe this was his way of reaching forward in time, intuiting what was to come at a moment when his own future was imperiled. Or perhaps it was an attempt to understand the perspective of the other members of the ERP, many of whom were in their early 20s and sometimes accused Dalton of being a middle-aged petit bourgeois “revisionist” not fully committed to armed struggle.

Dalton is believed to have completed the Poemas clandestinos in April 1975, though critic Jaime Barba suggests it may have been in progress throughout that spring. If so, it remains unfinished. On May 10, a few days shy of his 40th birthday, Dalton was executed by fellow members of the ERP, who said they suspected he was in league with the CIA. Few believed them, but the claim was uncannily predicted in Pobrecito poeta que era yo (I Was a Poor Little Poet), an autobiographical novel Dalton finished just before returning to his homeland. Its final chapter recounts an actual CIA interrogation that Dalton underwent in a Salvadoran jail in 1964. The agent who tried unsuccessfully to recruit him warned him not to imagine he would one day die a hero; the CIA would make everyone believe he’d been a traitor.

Two years after Dalton’s death, a handbound typescript of the Poemas clandestinos circulated underground in El Salvador. His sketched portrait and name take up most of the sheet of paper that served as its cover. Even in samizdat, the real name of the author had to be brought to bear. Some of the poems came out in a booklet in Peru the following year, and the full collection was eventually published in Mexico (1980), Costa Rica (1982), and, later, El Salvador (1999). By then, Dalton had been resurrected as the nation’s greatest poet.

A bilingual edition appeared in 1984, with English translations by the California Beat poet Jack Hirschman and an introduction by poet-activist Margaret Randall, who befriended Dalton during the years they both lived in Mexico. It was reissued two years later by Curbstone Press, which subsequently brought out a number of Dalton’s other works. The Hirschman translation was reissued again this year under the title Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, by Seven Stories, the Ocean Press, and the Centro de Estudios Che Guevara in Havana. The book’s back matter announces that the volume is the first in a forthcoming series of works by Dalton, including, for the first time in English, the novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo.

The long publication history of Poemas clandestinos, which includes translations into German, French, and Italian, affirms that the poems have withstood the test of time. Yet their aspiration to prescience occasionally betrays Dalton, particularly where matters of gender are concerned. A poem titled “In the Future,” by the heteronym Luis Luna, a literary critic and former student of architecture and sociology who gets the last word, promises that in the socialist world to come, people will feel the same shame over having once owned private property as they do when confessing “I had tendencies toward sexual aberrations.” In 1968, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, where Dalton received revolutionary training, ostensibly halted its practice of punishing sexual aberration by sending tens of thousands of young gay men to forced labor camps. But the brutality against them continued, as Reinaldo Arenas chronicled in his memoir Before Night Falls (1992).

The first word in the Poemas clandestinos goes to Dalton’s lone woman heteronym, Vilma Flores. She denounces capitalism for robbing male workers twice over; paid less than their work’s value, they have less money for household expenses to give their wives, whose “domestic functions / create time for the man / for socially necessary work.” The most awkwardly feminist of her poems, “Toward a Better Love,” with an epigraph from Kate Millett, says woman must stop being merely woman-in-herself to become woman-for-herself—then reiterates that a woman’s place is in “the rear-guard of domestic functions.” In her introduction, Margaret Randall ruefully notes that “Sexism was a problem for Roque …” though, she maintains, each of his hundreds of sexual relationships was “important to him … and clearly to the women involved, as well.”

In his recent book about Dalton, Castellanos Moya observes that the Poemas clandestinos include none of the personal anecdotes that characterize Dalton’s other works. Nevertheless, many of the poems are unmistakably the work of an archetypal persona that Dalton was fully caught up in: the charismatic male revolutionary intellectual who takes up arms to bring righteous justice to his people. The archetype goes back to the late-18th- and early-19th-century liberators whose feats of muscular military prowess became founding nationalist narratives for most countries in the Americas, a lineage acknowledged here in an allusion to “the old works of liberators and martyrs / that are our obligations now. …” Maybe the heteronyms were also Dalton’s unsuccessful attempt to project himself out of this historically consecrated persona, just as it was about to do him in.

Amid the misfires alpha male nationalism engendered, some of the poems radiate a power that has grown over time. By far the best known is “Like You,” reproduced in countless anthologies, poem-of the-day emails, blogs, and, no doubt, tattoos. It is signed by the youngest of the heteronyms, a law student—as Dalton once was—named Timoteo Lúe. On a planet overheating at terrifying velocity, the lines

… my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life …

transcend ideology in their appeal to collective action in defense of humanity and life itself.

Dalton knew that meanings change over time and things would be far worse if they didn’t, however precarious and ephemeral that may make us feel. A poem signed by the Catholic activist heteronym Jorge Cruz proposes a series of satirical epitaphs for the recently deceased and heartily despised Salvadoran bishop Francisco José Castro y Ramírez, whose compatriots dubbed him “Whited Sepulcher.” The first epitaph suggested for this bishop is “Of few men can it be said that they continue existing after death exactly as they were in life.”

Dalton, in life, was an irresistible charmer who made everybody laugh. The journalist Alma Guillermoprieto met him in Havana in 1970 and describes him in Dancing with Cuba, her memoir (which I translated), as inexhaustibly generous and the “wisest and funniest” of the intellectuals at the Casa de las Americas think tank. Julio Cortázar agreed, writing after Dalton’s death that “Among all the gifts Cuba has given me, meeting and becoming friends with Roque Dalton will always rank among the most precious.” Guillermoprieto was amazed and perplexed that the irreverent poet who befriended her—to the envy of her Cuban friends who saw him as the “crème de la crème of revolutionary internationalism”—devoted so much of his immense mental energy to questions such as “Is it possible to be an intellectual outside the Revolution? Is it possible to be a nonrevolutionary intellectual”—questions that, she concluded, were in and of themselves annihilating.

After Dalton’s death, Guillermoprieto moved to El Salvador, began working as a journalist, and thought a lot about her old friend Roque. Former ERP members told her that he had been executed because he’d gone after another guerilla leader’s girlfriend. The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was the same age as the people who killed Dalton; he met Dalton and mingled with all of the ERP revolutionaries on his way through El Salvador in 1973, and he had a different theory. Bolaño told an interviewer that several ERP commanders were themselves writers, and it was parricidal literary envy that drove them to shoot their more talented, more experienced, and better connected elder while he slept.

The friendship between Guillermoprieto and Dalton coalesced in part because both had a gringo parent. Dalton loved to claim that his father, Winnall Dalton Jr., was a descendant of the notorious Dalton Gang, a band of outlaw brothers who operated in California, Kansas, and Oklahoma in the early 1890s. The poet once hunkered down for a few days at the Havana Hilton with San Francisco playwright Nina Serrano to compose a gunslinging Brechtian Western about gringo marauders who head south, based on this supposed family history. It met with huge success when it aired live on Cuban TV in 1968; even Fidel Castro was a fan. Unfortunately, the studio’s lone video recorder wasn’t working that night, and the performance was forever lost to posterity.

The actual background of Dalton’s father, as researched by Roger Atwood, doesn’t track as readily with Hollywood myths of the Wild West. Winnall Dalton was born and raised in Arizona by a Spanish-speaking family of British and Mexican heritage embittered by an earlier generation’s loss of extensive tracts in California following US annexation. He made his way first to Mexico, then ever farther south, until he settled in El Salvador and acquired substantial properties by marrying a wealthy woman with whom he had several children. Later, while hospitalized with gunshot wounds received during a land dispute (says Atwood) or a quarrel over a woman (says Castellanos Moya), he impregnated one of his nurses, María García.

Though he supported his illegitimate son with occasional envelopes of cash and paid for the boy’s education at the Externado San José—“the great Catholic college of the Salvadoran bourgeoisie,” as one of these poems describes it—Winnall did not officially acknowledge this son, then known as Roque García, as his son until after the boy turned 17. A few years later, as Dalton was first making a name for himself as a journalist and poet, everyone knew he had a rich norteamericano father. Following a 1957 trip to the Soviet Union, his activism stepped up. The first time he was jailed, the Salvadoran president he’d been arrested for protesting against dismissed him at a news conference as “a spoiled brat.”

According to the gospel of Che Guevara—the “harsh angel” Guillermoprieto called him—what distinguished the men from the spoiled brats was not an ability to make people laugh uproariously or bring them together to work toward something but the willingness to die. The Poemas clandestinos seethe with the tension between stark self-immolation and the ironies, complications, and ambiguities that come with putting that into literature, the way gorila (“gorilla” or soldier in Salvadoran slang), for example, echoes in guerilla. Occasionally, a poem reaches toward an alternative vision of collective survival:

Against melancholy, trust; against
despair,
the voice of the people,
vibrating in the windows of this secret house.

The timing and manner of Dalton’s own demise further entangles things. An ode to Che titled “Ways of Dying” compares the Argentine revolutionary’s death in 1967 to that of the tens of thousands Augusto Pinochet killed in Chile and concludes “Imagine, reader, what they’d tell us / if they could speak of their experience / those dead in the name of each concept.” What would Dalton say, if he could speak now, about whatever concept it was in whose name he died?

Six years after Dalton’s death, Guillermoprieto was among the first to reach the town of El Mozote, where a battalion of the Salvadoran army trained by the United States at the School of the Americas in Georgia had just massacred 811 civilians. The presence of an annihilating empire is never far away in the Poemas clandestinos. The prose poem “The Certainty” seems, in particular, to respond, avant la lettre, to Carolyn Forché’s 1978 poem “The Colonel,” with its sack of human ears “like dried peach halves” spilled out across a dining room table by a Salvadoran torturer. In flash-fiction fashion, Dalton’s poem tells of a prisoner whose three torturers interrupt their work to ask if he can pick out which of them has a glass eye. After a searching glance, the tortured man points to one and says it’s his right eye. In disbelief—“the eye is American, that is, perfect”—they demand to know how he knew. “It was the only eye that looked at me without hatred,” he explains. Hatred itself seems at least human compared to the US-made eyeball’s glittering technological perfection.

Another poem begs all the “progressive sociologists” to leave off with their study of la enajenación—alienation—and focus instead on “the most fucked up” thing, which is la nación ajena. This could easily have been translated as “the alien nation,” repurposing the word the US government employed for decades to denote undocumented people fleeing violence in El Salvador and elsewhere. Hirschman, for some reason—perhaps an antipathy for Dalton’s wordplay—chooses to diminish the line’s impact by rendering it as “the other nation.”

If the goal of translation is to repeat as precisely as possible the intentions of an author, then Hirschman must once have seemed an irreplaceable translator for Dalton. A Communist himself, a poet of some renown, and Dalton’s contemporary, only two years older, Hirschman brings his own legend to bear, including the oft-repeated story that prior to his dismissal from the UCLA faculty for anti–Vietnam War activism, one of his students was Jim Morrison. According to a bibliography compiled after Hirschman died in 2021, he had authored 105 books of his own and 83 translations from 12 languages. And his translations of some of the most famous of these poems continue to win adherents.

Hirschman was also renowned for remaining a Stalinist to the very end. In 2001, his translations from the Georgian of early poems by the young man who went on to perpetrate the Holodomor were published under the affectionate title Joey. Dalton, for his part, was a Leninist who, though always careful in what he said about Stalin, included the line “Lenin was Stalin’s first important victim” in his poem-collage Un libro rojo para Lenin (A Red Book for Lenin)—another of the books forthcoming in the new series. Ideological alignment between author and translator may not be complete, after all.

Nor are they well-aligned linguistically. Hirschman translated very little from Spanish, and some of his work here shows he wasn’t much at ease in it. His version of Dalton’s poem about the bishop, for example, botches the joke by rendering sepulcro blanqueado as “whitewashed tomb.” In English, as in Spanish, whited sepulcher—from the King James translation of Matthew 23:27—means “hypocrite.”

In another poem, Dalton hails poetry itself as a kind of gun “among the beautiful true weapons glittering in the sunlight / in my hand or against my shoulder” (my translation). Hirschman seems to shy away from the idea of poetry as gleaming armament, translating the lines as “among beautiful real arms burning under the sun / between my hands and upon my shoulder,” which suggests the speaker may be experiencing or witnessing a painful sunburn.

At other moments, Hirschman introduces violence where Dalton’s words sidestep it. His version of the title “Como la siempreviva” is “Like the Everlasting," which puts an incongruous Old Testament spin on the word for a small flower, the sempervivum. An ode to tenderness, this is one of the few poems that evokes a natural landscape of plant and rock, tempest and drought. By rendering Entre las piedras y el fuego as “Among the rocks and the gunfire,” Hirschman evokes a guerilla battlefield rather than a momentary respite around the campfire.

Hirschman translated these poems around the time that, after a two-week visit to El Salvador, Joan Didion wrote “Terror is the given of the place” in Salvador (1983), the book US Anglos were then most likely to have read about the country. Dalton’s family history shows that the continuities among the United States, the territories it violently annexed from Mexico, Mexico itself, and Central America run very deep. But they were largely unacknowledged by Anglo observers. Lovato points out that Didion needed only to look around her to see California’s large and growing Salvadoran community or catch a whiff of centuries-old culinary traditions in the cooking smells emanating from apartments such as the one in San Francisco where his family lived. Instead, her work depicts a Golden State “wholly devoid of Salvadorans and all other Latinos.”

The publishers of the retitled Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle understand the need to relate Dalton’s work to the present when US workers across many industries are coming together to combat the longstanding forces that have diminished their share of everything. They’re also aware that a new cultural nexus has developed across national and linguistic boundaries. Writers such as Lovato and poet and memoirist Javier Zamora, who work in English, and others who write in Spanish, such as Castellanos Moya, the journalist Oscar Martínez, and Claudia Hernández, whose searing novel Slash and Burn was published in 2021 in a translation by Julia Sanches, have connected with substantial audiences in and beyond the US. In response, a new foreword was commissioned for this edition, written by LA-based Christopher Soto, a queer poet and prison abolitionist, and Salvadoran feminist economist Tatiana Marroquín.

They cite the line “everywhere the revolution needs people / not only willing to die/ but also willing to kill for it” and acknowledge that Dalton’s “violent praxis” makes it “feel dangerous” to speak of him in connection with the growing authoritarianism of the present. But they avoid addressing other problematics, noting, in an attempt to make the Vilma Flores poems more palatable, that “Lack of pay for domestic work is a reality for women in El Salvador”—as if this weren’t the case for women elsewhere and as if the poems argued that women should be paid for their domestic labor, which they don’t. Understandably, their new foreword's primary concern is to establish Dalton’s legendary status among Latin American writers and activists, past and present.

Soto and Marroquín make their best case for his continued relevance by citing, in its entirety, a poem from the Juan Zapata heteronym—the most warlike of the five, as the name indicates—sardonically titled “Advice That is No Longer Necessary Anywhere in the World but Here in El Salvador.” It has, they write, been, for decades, “recited among activists in Latin America as a warning, as a signal, and as a condemnation”:

Don’t ever forget
that the least fascist
among fascists
also are
fascists.

It’s another face of the “unanimous blood” proclaimed in “Like You.” The manner of Dalton’s death and the irony of many of his poems speak to the inadequacy of revolutionary certainties, the fallibility of comrades-in-arms. But Soto and Marroquín are right that this voice speaks to our present.

All the more reason to lament this missed opportunity for a new translation of the Clandestine Poems. Many contemporary poet-translators, strongly rooted in Spanish, could have contextualized this material beyond Cold War binaries and within the cultural continuities and imperial disjunctions of the Americas. They could have candidly tackled the ways the course of history has enlarged some of the poems while others have been diminished, and they would have been able to make them speak fully to our current moment. What might someone like that have been able to do with this book?