La vejez / Rodrigo Blanco Calderón

Old Age

The Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton and the Venezuelan writer Elizabeth Burgos in Havana in 1970. (Photo taken from the blog Tribulaciones y Asteriscos.)

The phrase is by Roque Dalton. It belongs to an essay titled “The Night I Met Régis” and it goes:

“And suddenly I saw the greying soul of thirty-one years almost caressing the scarf of its retreat in Prague and I felt in some way complicit with a form of being a certain age that couldn’t be mine consciously.”

Dalton speaks of old age, of that unrepeatable instant when a man sees with no distortion his own senescence, the slow acceleration towards death. Although the text was published in the magazine Casa de las Américas in the month of August 1968, Dalton makes a reference to a night in another August, in 1965, when he met Régis Debray in the apartment Oswaldo Barreto was assigned in Prague.

To come across this text precisely today, July 31st of 2012, the day I turn thirty-one, is enough to make you think of the matter with some method: to sit down and think by writing.

Just yesterday while I stared at Alejandra watching TV, I started to hum in my head, to ask her in silence: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?”

When I’m sixty-two, Alejandra will be fifty-two. Only then, in 2043, will our love have reached its own thirty-two years. Only then will our love, like an independent being, different from us and from our children, begin to think of its own old age, about whether it will arrive and how it will be when it’s sixty-four, when their bodies and love walk step in step to face dissolution together.

But I don’t want to think about those sad things. I wanted to think about and remember the late night of the 28th of September last year when I had a long conversation for more than five hours with Oswaldo Barreto.

I was at the decisive stage of the biography I was writing about Darío Lancini. Oswaldo Barreto, a former Communist Party activist, ex guerrilla fighter, university professor, writer, very sharp critic and airplane hijacker, he had been one of Darío Lancini’s closest friends. I was gathering various testimonies, but up to that point I had stumbled on the irreducible subtlety that Lancini had used to tempt the world. A bunch of evanescent anecdotes, perplexity shells. When I got in touch with Barreto to ask for a meeting, I had low expectations, I was prepared to leave his house and throw in the towel.

The encounter was magical, it made the book possible and produced an important change in my life.

We had agreed on meeting at four in the afternoon at his house, an apartment on Cajigal Avenue in San Bernardino. At four on the dot, at the entrance to his building, I called him from my cell phone. He answered the phone slightly flustered. He was just leaving the Bellas Artes subway station, the closest one to his house.

“We had agreed on five o’clock,” he said, “Right?”

“I had understood four o’clock,” I said.

“I’m on my way up, call me in a little while.”

I thought the meeting might not happen. Cajigal Avenue offered no café to kill time at, not even a little bench or a shaded spot where I might rest. The first drops of a personal rain began to fall. The sky stayed blue, the heat wouldn’t give up.

I walked down to plaza La Estrella and right beside a newsstand I found a low wall under the branches of a jabillo tree. I took out a book and settled down to wait for it to be five o'clock.

After ten pages, I heard a car braking, a horn blast and someone shouting. It was Oswaldo Barreto who was banging on the trunk of a taxi driver who hadn’t stopped for him to cross the street. He was carrying two grocery bags that slowed him down, wearing a little Persian cap and a woven shirt. His pants were jovial and baggy.

He seemed like he had been wounded somewhere by the commerce of Caracas. He was (and at the moment of writing these pages is) seventy-seven years old. The white chain of his beard, certain gentlemanly gestures, made me think of Baron von Münchhausen. Or at least, Terry Gilliam’s version in the opening scenes, when he bursts in, defeated, at a theater where his life is being played out falsely.

He saw me and kept walking while including me in his gait, as though we had agreed on neither four nor five o'clock at the door to his building, but at the conciliatory mid point of four-thirty, mid way home.

Swallowing Stones: A Novel is the fictionalized biography of Oswaldo Barreto written by Lisa St. Aubin de Terán.

The apartment was small and had high ceilings. Two large photos of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir presided one of the columns. The walls were covered by a crawling bookshelf and with paintings I couldn’t identify. As if each were an incarnation, two cats were hiding in different parts of the living room, each one involved in its own thoughts, but intimately linked, like Sartre and de Beauvoir.

But that was only an effect of the decoration, because the cats were called Cynthia and Freud.

“Cynthia for the Turkish singer Cynthia Gooding. Such a beautiful woman, with an exquisite voice. A name that’s turned out to fit her well, since she’s quite a lady,” Oswaldo said.

The cat, a turquoise grey, climbed onto one of the high chairs in the kitchen and purred.

“Freud, in his own way, also honors his own name: sex above all else, for him.”

Now is not the occasion to reconstruct the heart of the conversation that afternoon. Specifically, the tale from the night when Barreto, accompanied by Dalton, met Louis Aragon. That’s already been told in the biography, along with the secret connections between that scene and Lancini’s life. I’m interested, on the other hand, in referring to an anecdote that emerged almost at the end of the night, that Oswaldo told me specifically I should turn into a short story, whose title should be “Old Age.”

On September 18th 1975, when he turned forty-one, Oswaldo Barreto received one of the most beautiful gifts he has ever been given. A silk shirt. The most elegant and delicate silk shirt that his hands had ever touched.

Just a few months earlier, on the 10th of May, Roque Dalton was executed, it seems by a faction of the Revolutionary Army of the People, in El Salvador, accused of being a CIA spy. He was four days away from turning forty. Reaching forty-one was, for Barreto, the guarantee of his own survival. On that day Barreto knew he would face the most exotic destiny for a man of action: to grow old. He knew that the death of Dalton, his brother in combativeness and poetry, would propel him to the end of history.

The shirt was a gift from the mother of Mariana, his girlfriend at the time.

“Back then she must have been the age I am now,” Oswaldo said.

The next week, he went to the department store where she had bought him the shirt. He spoke with a clerk who changed it for another shirt, a pair of pants and two pairs of shoes. All the items were tasteful and much cheaper.

Days later, Mariana took him to her mother’s house to have lunch. Oswaldo arrayed himself with the loot he had obtained in exchange for the silk shirt. His girlfriend greeted her mom and went straight to the kitchen to help. He was left alone with her mother and as if he were a mannequin, he posed for her so she could appreciate his clothing.

“What happened to the silk shirt?” she asked.

“I exchanged it for all this,” Oswaldo said.

“Why did you do that? Didn’t you like it?”

Oswaldo’s answer prevented any reproach from her.

“That shirt was so lovely, ma’m, that in order for me to wear it I’d have to change my whole life.”

The mother, who knew about the turbulent agenda of her near son-in-law, understood perfectly what he wanted to say. So much that she sealed the pact with a kiss.

“She kissed me on the lips. A long and chaste kiss on the lips.”

A second later Mariana entered. Oswaldo looked at each of them, activating a game of mirrors that failed within seconds. Mother and daughter didn’t look anything alike.

“That’s when I knew that relationship had no future.”

Thirty-seven years later, on his seventy-eight birthday, Oswaldo received a gift that made him remember the other one.

He stood up from the table for a moment and went into his room to look for it. At that instant, we had already left behind his memories of Darío Lancini and a whole bottle of whiskey. Garcilaso appeared with two bottles of red wine and Iván Darío, the youngest of Oswaldo's children, joined the conversation with several plates of cheese and crackers from the kitchen.

It was a small and very elegant black bag. Before bringing it out, Oswaldo spent a while trying to describe it. It was one of those little bags, good for carrying over your shoulder, very comfortable. We spent a few minutes looking for the word mapire which we completely overlooked and now, ten months later, appears in the middle of my silence. The bag he was given was in dialogue with the spirit of the mapire, but it exceeded it in practicality, quality and beauty. And just as they gave it to him he decided to use it.

It was at the main desk of the newspaper Tal Cual, where Oswaldo writes a column that comes out twice a week, that someone mentioned that gift to him. The girl there asked him what he was doing with that bag on his shoulder:

“A gift. Don’t you think it’s nice?”

“Very nice. Too nice, Mr. Oswaldo. That’s the problem. Be careful.”

Then Oswaldo got the bag and let us look at it. Once I saw the label I understood everything: Mario Hernández. This ad is enough to explain the passage of time in Venezuela. In the fifties and sixties you could die for your ideals. Today, subversion consists of wearing a certain brand of shoes, bag or cell phone to tempt your luck.

Oswaldo Barreto, an ex guerrilla at heart, pursues danger in any of its transformations. He wears across his chest, as if it were a Mexican revolutionary’s cartridge belt, his bag, displaying it with no fear. But this isn’t the moral of this story. The moral of the short story he wanted me to write is more superficial and at the same time much deeper:

“Being old means accepting new things. That’s it, in the most materialist and historical sense of the word,” said Oswaldo.

Everyone celebrated the anecdote.

And yet, I had taken the job seriously and I paid the excessive attention I tend to pay, not very pleasant at all, when I feel as though I’m on the edge of a story. Something was missing in the tale for me to be able to write it. Something that couldn’t come from outside but rather from the very heart of the plot itself, but which had yet to be revealed. That something I’ve found today like a spontaneous birthday present.

Régis Debray, with a cigarette in his mouth, after being captured in Bolivia in 1967 for his participation in Che Guevara’s guerrilla army.

Dalton, in that account of a night in Prague in August of 1965, tells the following: “A French writer was staying at Oswaldo’s house. His wife, a Venezuelan girl who had been at my house a few days earlier, when I had been merely a pathetic drunk who needed to see new faces, and was staying up late excitedly. Oswaldo said: “Right over there with that child’s face, that’s the Frenchman who knows more than anyone else about guerrillas in Latin America.””

The Venezuelan girl was Elizabeth Burgos. And the Frenchman, Régis Debray. That night they had an appointment at the home of comrade Pierre Hentgés, on Lermontov Street. Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet and Lily Brick would all be attending. Debray, when he woke up, between uncombed and confused, attacked this commitment. “Do you still insist on attending these intimate acts with the Party bourgeoisie, with the great whores of the French intelligentsia, seated with their big asses on the world’s pinnacle, verbose, didactic and unbearable?” Dalton writes that Debray told them.

From this point on, what seemed like a chronicle of diaspora and political activism is transformed into a serene but no less implacable reflection on youth and old age. Dalton receives Debray’s anger indulgently (“the youth of the world, beautiful pumas trembling with rage”) and he also seals a pact with the wisdom of the old. Maybe he does this because at that moment, at thirty-one, he doesn’t feel young or old. Maybe he does it following the senseless calling to connect the impossible, the past and the future, sleep and vigil, communism and reality. That interregnum, the present the majority assimilates as a transition, is his definitive season. That’s where Roque Dalton remains, tied to the wall of his reflexive mood, ready to die and enter eternity in his own particular manner.

It’s in the final lines of Dalton’s text where I find the phrase that Oswaldo Barreto brought to life: “Being old means having renounced the elimination of a nothingness, the highest proof of the guiltiest overestimation.”

Those are the citations. They, along with the memory of that unforgettable conversation, have allowed me to identify where the nucleus of the story is to be found. At least, for the story that I was given to write, which is at each moment the point of contact between ages, states of being, experiences that aren’t consciously my own.

Now I see that the nucleus of the story, its possibility, is to be found in the mother’s kiss. In that door of time that opened up for Oswaldo when he was kissed by his own girlfriend’s mother. A maternal kiss, but not in the Oedipal sense that Freud, with catlike sumptuousness, would have surely emphasized. A maternal kiss in the sense of the helplessness in which our persistence places us, when we become children of the past and we fall asleep to the lullaby of the best memories.

But I didn’t want to think about such sad things. And much less on my birthday. I think I’ll stop here. I’m going to meet Alejandra. To find my future in her lips.




{ Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, Iowa Literaria, 1 October 2013 }

Pobrecito poeta que era yo... [excerpt] / Roque Dalton

It was transcribed in Nature’s memorandum down to the very details that this would be the day of my second birth. In less than ten minutes, when I still hadn’t normalized my breathing which had been altered by the rough run, the largest moon I’ve ever seen in my life started to rise in the center of the black sky, a moon like a photographer’s curtain at a fair or, to reduce myself to absurdity, a jungle cloth from the customs worker Rousseau. Everything was clear as day. Obviously, I decided to keep walking, no longer carrying the disadvantages of the black run. I walked, walked and walked, furiously. I walked until I fell to the ground exhausted, after nearly four hours of climbing and descending hills. I’ve always been a good walker despite my nicotine and all-night lungs with their hundred theater seasons (well, let’s say twenty), always full of tempermental and emtional second actresses at the exact instant. As I fell on the ground, before falling asleep, I thought I must have walked at least twelve kilometers and that I had twenty to go until San Salvador. I also thought: what type of persecution have they set up against me? Patrols, or have they surrounded me? Both at the same time?

When I awoke it must have been four in the morning. I tried to orient myself. But the night’s silence wouldn’t guide me and dawn’s lights had erased San Salvador’s glow from the firmament, which I’d been able to see before, each time I got to the top of a hill. After a while I heard the noise of a truck or bus and I could situate the highway. Despite the dangers I decided to reach it so I could see how far I’d advanced in parallel. A tough surprise awaited me at the highway, another “crater moment”: I was only two and a half kilometers away from Cojutepeque. In other words: still within reach of the hands of my jailers and more than thirty kilometers from the city where I’d seek shelter. The anguished walk had been invested in climbing and descending hills without moving farther away from the place I was escaping in a straight line like the highway. To console myself I recalled the imbecile Salvadoran soldier who in 1944, during the preparations for the student invasion from Guatemala to defeat Osmín Aguirre, calculated the distances on the map tracing straight lines from one point to another, without paying attention to the curves of surface level. Many of those invaders were killed by the National Guard when they’d fallen asleep along the way, dying of exhaustion. Those with the best luck had to execute their prisoners, accustomed to walking without cartographic limits, before falling asleep in their arms. I decided to walk on the highway a while, seeking out a better place to reenter the wilderness again, since the route I’d followed up until now cut through many paths. Darkness was still helping me. After about fifty meters I came across a group of campesinos headed to work. The bells of a nearby church rang, calling for the first service. I was in the outskirts of Santa Cruz Michapa, a little town I used to visit frequently as a child. I greeted the campesinos and picked up my pace. What to do? Cut through the little town and enter the wilderness through the street that goes to Tenancingo or keep going further down this road? I was meditating on this when a crosstown bus appeared rattling from the east, stuffed with passengers. Without thinking too much, almost automatically and not even believing he was going to stop for me, I gestured to the driver. I was surprised when the clunker stopped a few meters away. I got on. There was a National Guardsman riding with his machine gun. He looked straight at me, but did nothing else. My look, my torn clothes, my filth, enough to fail me at an auto-stop restaurant, were nonetheless not much of a spectacle: rags are the social uniform of extensive levels of El Salvador’s rural population. I still had sixty-five cents left over from the peso the gullible police officer had given me and the fare to San Salvador cost me fifty. For a minute I had thought of getting off mid-way there, in a little town called San Martín where I remembered a friend of mine and fellow student named Elías Herrera lived, but then I thought it was still possible to gain some time against the eventual trap they’d lay for me. Plus, it would soon be dawn, it was nearly five in the morning. Since the bus was packed I consciously hid amid the squeeze of bodies, smells and colors: an amorphous mass of my people, recently awoken and still sleepy, lap of us all.

The journey unfolded without incident for about twenty kilometers and I was thinking a great deal about how I would enter the city, how I needed to find a friendly house before the sun came up. Cursing the hour it ever ocurred to me to live a life so full of interviews and big photographs in all the newspapers, I thought they would surely be waiting for me already at the bus terminal and that going all the way there would be a stupid mistake. The presence of a high level CIA agent in the interrogation had forced me to accept that the Salvadoran repressive organs act with the methods of their masters, the North American secret service. The matter of mobilizing and eluding the persecution was becoming seriously more complicated due to my lack of knowledge of how the city and its surroundings function today. Since I’d been out of the country for two years and since the criteria of the Salvadoran authorities who monitor traffic are as variable as the interests at play, I made a chaos of the bus route numbers, their schedules, names and bus stop locations. In concrete terms, I didn’t know when to get off the bus so I could be as close to the city as possible without arriving at the terminal. Suddenly, the bus stopped, very close to the Ilopango airport. Because of the crush of bodies that absorbed my view of the entire panorama outside, I didn’t realize at the time why we’d stopped. An old man who was sitting next to me told his wife that a bus had stopped behind us, a city bus already, and he asked her to confirm if it was one from route 29, which goes between the airport and the Hotel El Salvador, at the other end of the city, at the foothills of the great volcano. When the woman, with her better vantage point, was able to confirm that it was indeed one of those buses, they both decided to get off and get on to the other bus. Since that route was also convenient for me, since it would resolve all my problems for getting into the city, since it crossed it lengthwise, I descended after them and likewise got on the other one. It was a very lit-up bus, a Berliet or Mercedes Benz. The fare was ten cents to downtown.

When I sat down and took a first glance through the ample windows, I realized why they had stopped the other bus. Stretched out across the highway, in the section that goes into San Salvador, were two cars from the police Special Investigations Unit. A group of plainclothes agents with machine guns, among whom were several who had guarded me in the gasconniére, were pulling people out of their cars and shining flashlights in their faces, checking the trunks and looking under seats. Two army officials were leading the operation. A couple got on the bus and sat behind me. The man was a fellow student of mine at Law School, for several years, but he didn’t recognize me when he looked at me as he passed by. The driver closed the door and beeped the horn asking for them to let him go through right at the moment when the police were making the passengers get off the bus I’d just abandoned (including the National Guardsman with his machinegun). Because of how the cars were parked they hadn’t seen me get off the bus, even though everything happened within a radius of about twenty meters. Our driver was behind schedule and he pressed the accelerator, starting the maneuver to back up and then go around the road block. But they blew a whistle at him and he stopped the bus, turning the ignition off. I thought they’d already seen me and that this was as far as my escape would go. I consoled myself thinking that my recapture would be witnessed by my old buddy from Law School and that through him people would know about the event until news reached the Party. As for me, I would make a big scandal and would shout out my name in order to leave evidence that I would still be held (or be killed) at the hands of the government, that was still denying any involvement in my kidnapping. But no one came over and the driver turned on the bus again, grumbling angrily that he was in no mood for losing time and that he had a schedule to follow. He passed the old bus and when a policeman tried to stop him, another one shouted: “Let it through, it’s a city bus and it starts from here.” As we went through the road block, the heads of the army officers passed by just below the level of my jaw.




{ Roque Dalton, Pobrecito poeta que era yo..., San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1994, pp. 439-442 }

Bolañismo

Two years ago I wrote an essay about correspondences between Roberto Bolaño’s two masterpieces, The Savage Detectives and 2666 and Roque Dalton’s only novel, the posthumous (and still untranslated) Pobrecito poeta que era yo... (1976). Since then, my essay (“Poor Poets: Roque Dalton and Roberto Bolaño”) continues to be the single most read post at Venepoetics, and I recently noticed someone cites it at Bolaño’s Wikipedia page. I not only compared their novels, but spoke of a possible friendship between the two, when they allegedly met in San Salvador in the mid 1970s. But I might have been mistaken about this encounter between Dalton and Bolaño.

As with much of my work, I now find my essay to be clumsy and repetitive, clouded by poor prose and vague arguments. I wrote the text after noticing a brief fragment in a 2005 feature about Bolaño in The New York Times by Larry Rohter, “A Writer Whose Posthumous Novel Crowns an Illustrious Career.” I was intrigued by Rohter’s suggestion that Bolaño had met Dalton in San Salvador in late 1973 or early 1974: “After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible [...].”

I spent two years seeking evidence about this alleged meeting, but Rohter’s article was the only thing I found that directly linked the two writers. I suppose I should have simply written him to ask where he’d gotten this piece of information. Bolaño himself mentioned having lived briefly in El Salvador where he befriended Dalton’s young killers (the most famous of which is the former FMLN commander Joaquín Villalobos, who is currently a scholar at Oxford). Back then, that hardcore band of Maoist guerrillas didn’t even call themselves the FMLN, they were an ultra-leftist group of kids barely out of their teens known as the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP).

Dalton eventually fell out of favor with this faction he was aligned with during his time living underground in a series of safe houses in San Salvador, from December of 1973 until his death in the spring of 1975. Because so much of his life depended on secrecy back then, it’s still not clear exactly who ordered his murder and why exactly he was killed. I’ve heard all sorts of reasons, including that they suspected him of being a CIA agent, that he had slept with one of their girlfriends, or that they mistrusted his advice about not rushing into revolutionary action before the time was right. It’s likely the truth about Dalton’s disappearance will never be known, as even his body was never recovered.

Two days ago, Rohter published another article about Bolaño, “A Chilean Writer’s Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past,” in which he quotes old friends in Mexico and Spain who claim he may have invented portions of his own life for public consumption. The most prominent of these possible inventions is the story that he was in Chile during the coup against Salvador Allende. I won’t go further into the article, as much of it seems like mere literary gossip. What matters about Bolaño is his magnificent work, not how he chose to portray his life or the stories he may have invented in order to become the writer he was destined to be. If anything, Bolaño’s possible distortions of his own life seem like a marvelous extension of his visionary work, further blurring the line between art and lived experience.

But reading the article has confirmed certain doubts I began to have soon after writing my essay on a possible friendship between Dalton and Bolaño. I have to admit that after four years of research and detective work, in El Salvador, the U.S. and Venezuela, I still have no idea if the two writers ever did meet. I’m pretty sure Bolaño could have befriended members of the ERP, but I have yet to find convincing evidence or testimony that he was in direct contact with Dalton. I don’t know what this means for my essay. However, I stand by the parallels I point out between their novels.

By the way, when will somebody finally translate Dalton’s Pobrecito poeta que era yo..., probably the only Latin American Boom masterpiece that hasn’t been published in English yet? I’d love to try it, but someone would have to provide the money I’d need to take on such a gargantuan task. Then again, Dalton’s book remains unread even in Latin America. It seems to have disappeared into a stack of the infinite library, a fact Bolaño & Borges would appreciate. When Pobrecito poeta que era yo... is finally read throughout Latin America, and once American readers finally get to know the novel, the one-sided perception of Dalton as being merely a “revolutionary” or “political” poet will seem like an antiquated misreading. I still have no doubt that Roberto Bolaño read Roque Dalton’s novel and was deeply influenced by its bohemian, revolutionary and psychedelic meanderings. Plus, the account of their friendship in San Salvador would make a great Bolaño story. Here’s to the secret books.

Con palabras / Roque Dalton

With Words

                                      For Enrique Lihn, on his wedding


        A complete knowledge of the world of words is impossible, at least for the human species and despite what cybernetics insinuates. We don’t even know how to begin. The word “azul” [blue], for instance, can very well be red or brownish-grey, depending on one’s state of mind, climate conditions, the plasticity of the sound wave or political necessities. A series of words that couldn’t be finished and is typographically resolved with an ellipsis is the only serious argument one can provide to prove the existence of God, though not necessarily his emergence from infancy and the possession of the common sense he is generally, very blithely, assumed to possess. There are twelve words in the Pipil language that evacuate the bowels, so as to not say it another way, if they are spoken out loud while staring at your belly button aligned with the firmament. It is evident that Lord Bertrand Russell will never be able to use the words babarabatíbiri, chivo [goat] or listín without the entire modern humanist movement receiving the equivalent of an underwater bomb. And what is onomatopoeia if not word-pliers with which, after sitting them down in the dentist’s chair and making them open their mouth, we extract the soul of things? If we take the words “granada” [grenade], “rompedora” [breaker], “de” [of], “ochenta” [eighty], “y” [and], “un” [one] and “milímetros” [millimeters], and we pin little sacks of gunpowder to their tails before letting them slide down the tube of an adequate mortar, what falls a few hundred meters in front of us is the sharpest moment of the toast in “La Traviata,” at such a volume that, any person who is moderately informed would think that New York’s entire Metropolitan Opera House had fallen from the sky, splitting apart like a rotten coconut and releasing that scandal. Wordless man is not synonymous with mute but rather with zombie. A wordless poet can continue to publish little books in deluxe editions and host cocktail parties so as to keep throwing things into literary pages, or even join Academies or clubs. But if Neruda – to cite a well known case – has something of the zombie after Residencia en la tierra, how do we discover, recognize, classify, the virus of the dead, the cadaverous profile in his subsequent books, the expendable viscous mass in order to isolate the architectonic elements that maintain locomotion’s physiology and the respiratory impudence of the living-dead whom the audience would poison; that is to say, finally, how do we differentiate a living word from one that is ready for the championship? Well, as Erique Muiño would say, when words die music begins and this is very serious for those of us who aren’t immune to 70 ampere headaches. One of the most abominable crimes of Western civilization and Christian culture has consisted precisely in convincing the great popular masses that words are merely signifying elements. That the word cebolla [onion] and that the word oropéndola only came to earth in order to synthesize for us a plumage of night and fire, a modest flight and a special appetite for ripe plantains. The Chinese have treated the word differently and we already know how quickly they proceeded from great famines to hydrogen bomb. No one baptizes their child with the name Sisebuto without experiencing symptoms of meningitis for a few seconds. Should we perchance escape through the tangent – which would be nothing more than a dark reiteration of what we intend to negate or question – of saying that it’s a case of a word that sounds awful? Why does a word free of significations sound awful if not because of something intrinsic in itself, its corporality, its being, which is independent from its most common function, which, on the other hand doesn’t have to be its only one, nor its principal one? We aren’t required to start trembling in the face of these problems, but we must recognize that once we accept the existence of words that can’t be said in any way, we establish a very serious fact. It occurs to me that from there we can depart on a not too distant date toward marking the limitations of anti-matter in physics and nothingness in philosophy. So that no one can come and say that poets spent their time with a lyre in their arms and dawn on their lips, as Otto René Castillo would say quoting Werner Ovalle López, a fact which, and notwithstanding the great authority Otto now has, is not completely true. One must have a great deal of good sense however to not fall for the traps the enemy lays for us, which are present on this terrain as in any other. One of these is what we could call “smoke-curtain-with-function-substitute.” This is what has been done with those poor words “Sesame” and “open,” whose task as signifiers has merely been changed in order to transform them into little keys for thieves’ dens, while swiping their true metaphysical essence. Between “open” as a key and “open” as such, there exists the same distance as between a shop selling mediocre locks and Kant’s room in Koënisberg, and between one “Sesame” and another “Sesame,” the one that exists between Disney and Picasso. Another trap would be infamy – that belonging to the “word of honor.” What one needs is humility, the methodology of being at a disadvantage, the subtlest of fields. We know nothing and are proud until we die. We should remember what happened to Stalin because he made words the exception of dialectical materialism: which led to Babel’s death, to the International’s shipwreck-amidst-ice-floes, to contemporary Soviet prose. If we had faced the problem head on with passion and courage, the situation would be different and magnificent. It would have been enough to begin truly knowing words, to organize them for the future, to discuss liberty with them and, above all, to separate them from quasi-words, anti-words, degenerate words (ex: in order to say “caldo” [stew] in El Salvador they say “Calderón,” “sebo” [grease] is spilled toward “Sebastián” and “medallas” [medals] is the same as “me das” [you give me], all of which is the degeneration of the words pinta [look] and parada [stop], clavada [dive], as Julito Cortázar would say) and dead words. Forget about zeniths and nadirs, forget about regrets as you emerge from the ecstasies: the most beautiful words in the world are: cinabrio [cinnabar], azafata [stewardess], saudade, áloe [aloe], tendresse, carne [meat], mutante [mutant], deprecatingly, melancolía [melancholy], pezón [nipple], chupamiel [honey sucker] and xilófono [xylophone], and if I’ve wasted time in declaring these things because later on someone will confirm that no one has truly understood them, it has been done in the same manner as Jesus Christ or Lenin, and accepting this will at least make me sleep well tonight. That is, if they don’t come and tell me at the last minute that it’s my turn to serve guard duty anyways.




{ Roque Dalton, Taberna y otros lugares, La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1969 }

“Ahora contemplo / el mar en que La Habana se examina la cara. ”

I carried a pocket notebook with me when I was in El Salvador and tried to write sketches of moments and places whenever I could. One such place was the shoreline of Lake Güija in the village of Azacualpa, a short drive outside Metapán. During a lull in the torrential rain that day (from tropical storm Alma), I had a chance to sit on some rocks by the water and write the following page:


Again, the mist covers
the hills and ripples
from the lake lap
against black stones
voices echo across the
shoreline, Christian
music broadcasts on
a distant speaker –
canoes (“pirogues” as
in Omeros) with small
outboard motors on
the shore, only one out
in the lake beneath
the heavy soak, to the
right you can get to
Guatemala in about
45 minutes by boat –
Wordsworth’s “spots
of time,” this is a
district I could walk
but the rain has
returned to close the book


When I would pause from writing, I could watch the rain moving steadily across the lake towards me. The heavy mist floating over the landscape seemed to spark the union of intense, dark green from the earth and the dim grey of the skies. The only sounds I noticed were the small waves lapping against the rocky shore below, the Christian songs blasting from a loudspeaker somewhere behind me (it was Sunday) and, eventually, a stray dog who came by to bark at me from a distance.

A few days earlier I had finished reading Roque Dalton’s long collage poem “Los hongos” [Mushrooms], which as far as I know hasn’t been translated into English. It’s a masterful poem, written in Havana, Paris and Prague between 1966 and 1971. The text is dedicated to his friend Ernesto Cardenal and deals partly with Dalton’s conflicted allegiance to both Catholicism and Marxism. At this point in his career, Dalton had moved beyond his seemingly effortless talent for lyrical poems, instead creating pieces that were filtered through his eclectic research interests. “Los hongos” was composed during the fertile period that saw the appearance of his famous long piece “Taberna” [Tavern], which also employed the collage method. Reading both poems side by side, one notices the more conflicted and meditative tone of the former in contrast to the gregarious, drunken hi-jinks of the latter.

In “Los hongos” Dalton seems to be trying to evoke, or inhabit, the notion of Christian mysticism in relation to poetic thought. When he looks out into the sea from his apartment in Havana, he notices a mirror:


“Ahora contemplo
el mar en que La Habana se examina la cara.
Ahora sé que de él venimos gateando como penitentes,
y que a él volveremos cuando sobre la tierra
hasta nuestros contemporáneos protozoarios hayan
organizado su cultura y su libertad.”

[Now I contemplate
the sea in which Havana examines its face.
Now I know that we come from it crawling like penitents,
and that we will return to it when on earth
even our contemporaries the protozoa will have
organized their culture and their freedom.]


I had been reading his poems from the Visor anthology published in Madrid in 2000, which has a pretty comprehensive selection edited by Mario Benedetti. At the airport in San Salvador, I found the second volume of Dalton’s complete poems, which is being published in excellent paperback editions by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte: No pronuncies mi nombre: Poesía completa II (San Salvador: CONCULTURA, 2008). This edition covers one of the most productive periods in Dalton’s career, 1964-1973. One can only look forward to a third volume in the future.

Among the first things I read upon my return was Your Country is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana (New York: Futurepoem, 2008) by Ara Shirinyan. These are two very different types of poets. But a thread that aligns them, at least in my reading, is the concern for how individuals maneuver through a shrinking globe, where cities and cultures bleed into one another, usually by means of unforgiving market forces. In an introductory note, Shirinyan describes his method of composition – another commonality between these poets being the use of collage:


“Using Google, I would type “[country] is great” and search. [...] For those countries that brought up very few results I have done my best to use everything that came up. For those countries that gave hundreds of page results, there came a moment when I thought that I had enough to work with.”


I read Your Country is Great in one sitting, frequently laughing out loud at Shirinyan’s eye for absurdities, the tragicomedy of everyday life. His line breaks often emphasize the frivolity or ignorance of certain evocations of particular countries. At times, the reader gasps at the insights these poems reveal about our age, when countries are reduced to web sites and tourism serves as an updated form of conquest. The poem about El Salvador is among the best in the book, for its accuracy as well as its hilarious images. It seems a good antidote to any visionary pretensions a poet might develop while traveling. I also think Dalton would recognize the poem’s irresistible wit:


El Salvador is Great

EL SALVADOR IS GREAT!!!

el salvador is great for shopping
they have good malls
and their currency is the
US dollar.

Overall,
El Salvador is great.
Cant wait to go back!

The seafood in El Salvador is great,
but you do have to take care
if your system is not used to it.
They eat a lot of ceviche
(raw fish ‘cooked’ in lime),

We ate a couple meals at Pollo Campero and pizza hut.
I was happy to eat platanos every day while we were there.

concern for El Salvador is great
in Iowa.

El Salvador is great,
but that does not stop.
a group of
opthalmologists, optometrists,.
nurses and technicians
from making the trek
each winter.

El Salvador is great, and
you are really adventurous to go there!
You are going to discover so many undiscovered
places that are pure gems.

El Salvador is great, but
I think I’m ready to go
back to the states.

¿Revolución en la revolución? y la crítica de derecha

In the summer of 1967, the Venezuelan communist party (PCV) leader Pompeyo Márquez published an essay entitled “Guerrillas y partidos comunistas” [Guerrilla Armies and Communist Parties]. This was the beginning of a debate that ensued between segments of the the PCV and Fidel Castro – a series of disagreements Márquez alludes to in a recent edition of his column for Tal Cual [see my translation here]. Márquez and PCV members such as Teodoro Petkoff were in the process of moving away from armed struggle toward a social democratic stance that would eventually lead to their founding of the party Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in the early 70s. Márquez became a communist as a teenager in 1937, and he was a legendary clandestine combatant in the struggle against the dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 50s. Today he continues to be an active participant in Venezuelan politics, warning of the grave danger posed by the militaristic project being installed by Chavismo.

I discovered Márquez’s essay while researching the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, whose book ¿Revolución en la revolución? y la crítica de derecha (Casa de las Américas, 1970) is partly a response to the former. Dalton is mainly concerned with commenting on his friend Régis Debray’s essay ¿Revolución en la revolución? (Casa de las Américas, 1967) and the critiques the book sustained from sectors of the Latin American left. While elucidating Debray’s thesis that a small guerrilla army, and not the communist party, should be the vanguard of the fight against imperialism in Latin America, Dalton identifies several currents within Latin American communist thought, including a “right” within the left, which is where he situates Márquez. I haven’t been able to find a copy of Márquez’s essay but Dalton quotes from it extensively, enough to give an idea of its central argument. For Márquez, the party was to have precedence over the guerrilla army, which is always dependent on specific political and social contexts. He writes:


“Today’s task is to ideologically, politically and organically strengthen the communist parties, to place them at the height of the great tasks that remain to be accomplished and to equip them with an effective domain over all the forms of struggle, adequately managing their opportune and skillful combination, learning to engage, at every opportunity, in legal and illegal combat, peaceful and violent, according to the political juncture of each of our countries.”


I don’t have the time to discuss Dalton’s eloquent critique of Márquez’s position. But he sides with Fidel Castro against Márquez and Petkoff in the debate about the direction to be taken by the left in Latin America at that political juncture. Dalton’s ignominious death at the hands of his fellow guerrillas in San Salvador within years of writing ¿Revolución en la revolución? y la crítica de derecha, points to the mistake of his position. That same revolutionary vanguard he invokes in defense of Debray, with its Leninist conception of a small group imposing the will of the masses by violent means, eventually executed Dalton precisely for his stance as an intellectual first and soldier second. Joaquín Villalobos and the other members of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) have in recent years admitted they were mistaken in accusing Dalton of being a spy, but in 1975 they were merely following the Leninist-Maoist line the poet had invoked in his essay. Dalton’s essential identity as an intellectual seemed suspicious to the ERP guerrillas who were barely out of their teens, and who believed that guns precede words in a revolutionary struggle.

One wonders whether Dalton’s thinking would have progressed beyond the desperate belief in the necessity of violence in a revolutionary project, as Márquez and Debray have ended up doing. In some ways, the rise of Chavismo is merely a continuation of a debate that’s been going on within the Latin American left for decades. In his Tal Cual column Márquez writes about his shift away from Marxism-Leninism toward democratic socialism, in an effort to think dialectically over time:


“In 1971 I helped found the MAS political party, with an accent on democracy within socialism. I had been educated in the “immediate collapse of capitalism” and what collapsed was the “socialist world.” From that point until today my thinking has continued to evolve until reaching the conclusion of social democracy, as a synthesis of the aspirations of the great popular masses to which I’ve dedicated my life from the time I was 14 years old until my 85 years today.”

Roque Dalton, libros... / Juan José Dalton

Roque Dalton, Books…



As the the 32nd anniversary of Roque Dalton’s murder draws near, our family and the Australian publishing house Ocean Press, of which Ocean Sur is a subsidiary, have signed an agreement to publish the entire Daltonian oeuvre, the poetry, the essays and the political writings.

The texts are more than a few. By the age of 39 – he was 4 days shy of turning forty when he was murdered – he had produced such an amount of books that at this moment we don’t have an exact number for them.

But his production ceased when a commmando of murderers including Joaquín Villalobos (alias Atilio) and Jorge Meléndez (alias Jonás), acting under the orders of Edgar Alejandro Rivas Mira, ended his life, riddling him with bullets in a house in the Santa Anita district of San Salvador. Perhaps there were other murderers, but these are the ones who are still alive: Villalobos lives in England; Meléndez is a councilman for the San Salvador mayor's office – to the historic shame of the FMLN party – and Rivas Mira is hidden beneath the plastic surgery he underwent, using the profits he made from the kidnapping and murder of businessman Roberto Poma.

Regardless, it has been said that each person should write at least one book in his life and my father wrote more than 20 in his short life.

Ocean Press is the publishing house that has been able to disseminate the writings of Ernesto “Che” Guevara with great success, not only in Spanish, but in English as well. The contracts signed between the Dalton family and Ocean Press also include the dissemination of his work in English and Spanish.

We had never before signed a contract such as this one. While it is true that Dalton’s work is the most famous and disseminated of any Salvadoran, his publications have been sporadic. The majority of his literary work is known in Mexico, Spain, the United States, Cuba and in El Salvador.

My father’s political writing is truly quite unknown: “Revolución en la Revolución y Crítica de Derecha,” “Profesión de sed,” “Revolución e Imperialismo en Centroamérica” and other texts, which include collections of articles and letters, will be divulged not just in El Salvador, but throughout Latin America and in English-speaking countries: the United States, Canada, England and Australia.

This is good news for the lovers of Roque Dalton’s work and for those who might want to investigate the pillars of Salvadoran and Central American literature and culture. It is magnificent news for the new generation of Salvadoran intellectuals. This work will be in their hands so that they might appreciate it, study it and critique it; so that they might put it in its rightful place considering the era and the circumstances in which it was written.

So then, 32 years after he was murdered, Roque Dalton, his words, his ideas, his brilliant thought and his work shine like never before. The dissemination of his critical and reflective writing, which is the inheritance he left our nation, is the tribute we pay him day to day. Roque Dalton doesn’t need statues or sterile monuments to immortalize him; these only serve so that little street dogs might piss on them each day or, in the best of cases, so they might scratch their fleas.




Translator’ note: Juan José Dalton is a Salvadoran journalist who writes for various international publications including Contrapunto (Ecuador), El País (Spain) and Raíces (El Salvador).




{ Juan José Dalton, jjdalton.blogspot.com, 30 March 2007 }

Poor Poets: Roque Dalton and Roberto Bolaño [Updated]

In The Origins of Postmodernity, Perry Anderson suggests that modernism and postmodernism “…both were born in a distant periphery rather than at the centre of the cultural system of the time: they come not from Europe or the United States, but from Hispanic America…” After this initial mapping, Anderson goes on to discuss Fredric Jameson’s explorations of art and literature in the second half of the 20th century. One area Anderson points to as not being sufficiently theorized by Jameson is cultural production at the margins of North American and European influence: “The scope of Jameson’s work exceeds this occidental boundary. But it can be asked whether, in doing so, it nevertheless still projects an unduly homogeneous cultural universe at large, modeled on the North American system at its core.” (This critique of Jameson is brilliantly laid out by Aijaz Ahmad in his book, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Verso, 1994.) As part of an effort to move beyond the limits of that “North American system,” literary discourse on the postmodern might consider the techniques employed in the posthumous novels of the poets Roque Dalton (El Salvador, 1935-1975) and Roberto Bolaño (Chile, 1953-2003).

Dalton’s only completed novel, Pobrecito poeta que era yo… [Poor Little Poet That I Was], first published in Costa Rica in 1976, remains largely unknown. A key text of the late Boom era, it tries to develop a path beyond the political dichotomies of the 1960s and 70s, even while Dalton himself remained deeply committed to revolutionary action. Bolaño’s gigantic and incomplete 2666, published in Spain in 2004, is being hailed by many readers and fellow writers, such as the Colombian novelist Santiago Gamboa who in his column for the magazine Cambio described it as “…[A] trench from where all of us who believe in this can (and should) keep fighting.” Taking up themes from his other long novel Los detectives salvajes (which Farrar, Straus and Giroux is releasing here in the U.S. as The Savage Detectives next month), Bolaño’s 2666 mirrors the structure and some of the topics of Dalton’s bohemian epic Pobrecito poeta que era yo..., employing poetry as a central conceit for the text. Considering Bolaño’s use of autobiographical motifs in his fiction, the correspondence between these novels might partly originate in their brief encounter in San Salvador in late 1973 (or early 1974), when Dalton was living in clandestine safe-houses and Bolaño was returning to Mexico after having escaped jail and near-death during the infamous coup against Salvador Allende.*

Dalton remains a contradictory figure today. A political outlaw and groundbreaking intellectual in his own country throughout his short life, he is now arguably El Salvador’s most important 20th century writer. His political militancy and his poetry are usually read simultaneously. Yet, his final and most ambitious book is a massive semi-autobiographical novel organized into 5 separate books (with an addendum of newspaper clippings), all of which reject clear-cut political stances.

Dalton was killed by his fellow guerrillas in El Salvador, who accused him of being a CIA operative, as well as a bourgeois intellectual too concerned with theorizing revolution instead of enacting it. The final book of Pobrecito poeta que era yo... is based on his own escape from prison in El Salvador in 1964. Some of the novel’s most eerie, testimonial-like pages occur when a famous young poet is arrested in San Salvador and eventually interrogated by a CIA agent, who offers him opportunities and comfort if he agrees to abandon his militancy and instead focus on literature divorced from political engagement. The poet refuses this offer and manages to miraculously avoid death by escaping into the hills outside his prison, partly thanks to an earthquake. These events, narrated in the final book of the novel, are closely based on incidents in Dalton’s own tumultuous life, events that along with his brilliant poems and essays made him a legendary figure among Latin American and European intellectuals of his generation. The protagonist of the book, like Dalton, eventually flees San Salvador for Havana, from where he narrates his story.

Considering this is a novel by one of the most well-known poets in Latin America, there seems to be an uncomfortable (or is it merely ignorant?) silence surrounding the book. It's almost as if some readers or editors might consider Dalton’s sprawling bohemian epic, which opens raucously in a bar at midday, an incomprehensible departure from the explicit political tenor of his previous work. While UCA Editores in San Salvador has kept the book in print, it remains difficult to find outside of El Salvador, which could be another reason for its obscurity. Just as Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (1968) evoked the multiple literary and musical underworlds of Havana in the late 1950s, Dalton's book gives us a vivid portrait of San Salvador’s literary avant-garde during that same decade. Dalton employs an urban Salvadoran Spanish that vividly reflects the aesthetic, political and libidinal concerns of a radical generation of young writers.

Pobrecito poeta que era yo... was written in two stretches over a decade, in San Salvador during the early 1960s and Havana in the early 1970s. The book’s composition was interrupted by Dalton’s arrest for revolutionary political activities in 1964. By the time he returned to El Salvador from Cuba for the last time in 1973 he had finished the novel, expanding it into a complex collage of voices, narratives and aesthetics spread out across two decades. The novel can be read within the same experimental context of work by figures such as Cabrera Infante, Cortázar and Lezama Lima. It was during this final interlude in San Salvador, when he had more or less abandoned aesthetic concerns for political ones, that Dalton met the young Bolaño. Because of their age difference, this encounter between the two poets could perhaps be seen as a type of mentorship. Meeting Dalton months before his murder had a profound effect on Bolaño, as he revealed in a 1998 interview with the Spanish magazine Lateral:


“[…] There you have the case of that Salvadoran poet who was murdered by his own comrades. I met several of the people who killed Roque Dalton. I lived in El Salvador before the Civil War began, and out of the ten main comandantes four where writers. And I met two of them. One who was called Cienfuegos and another one whose name I can’t remember. And I met many writers and…

Charming people, I’m sure…
Sure, man, charming. Some not so much. Besides, I traveled the entire Pacific coast of Latin America on my way down to Chile in 1973, and these guys were my age: twenty, twenty-two, twenty-three…Or a bit older. The one who introduced me to these people was Manuel Sorto, who was the official cinematographer for the guerrillas, the one who made the movies, risking his life, which were shown all over the world. He was a very ethical person. But, for example, Cienfuegos, who was one of the men who gave the order to kill Roque Dalton, I even ask myself whether there wasn’t even a little bit of literary animosity there.

Why? Was he a bad poet?
No, Cienfuegos wasn’t a bad poet, but compared to Roque Dalton he had nothing. I think they killed Dalton, basically, in the manner of children enacting the ritual of killing the father.

But instead of it being literary, that time the murder was literal.
Yes, yes, literal. Besides, they killed him while he slept. They didn’t wake him up; he never knew they were going to kill him. They debated all day long, because Roque Dalton was opposed to an armed uprising and the comandantes said that the time was now and that they had to start the revolution. They didn’t reach an agreement; Roque Dalton went to sleep, the comandantes kept debating and said: “We have to kill him.” As though they were a band of gangsters. And they said, “Let’s kill him now that he’s sleeping, because he’s a poet, so he won’t suffer.” That’s literally what they said. […]”


Dalton and Bolaño both write about the struggle to become an artist, in some ways like Joyce did, chronicling what an individual might go through mentally and materially in order to devote himself to writing. At one point in the fourth book of Pobrecito poeta que era yo..., we find the following entry in a young writer’s journal, outlining his hopes for a novel that would invoke a shaman’s poetic methods:


“My novel should be irritating and cathartic. Searching that intense fever, provoked by the scream of the shaman who will extract the ills from the body through sweat and urine, and those of the soul through desperation.”


This effort to create a cathartic narrative is evident in Bolaño’s masterpiece, 2666. Its fourth book, “La parte de los crímenes,” moves beyond the fictional world of a reclusive German writer named Beno von Archimboldi, turning its gaze on the brutal murders that have afflicted the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez for over a decade now. The relentless, flat newspaper-prose of this section of the novel forces us to lie in abandoned desert ravines and city dumpsters with an interminable list of mutilated female victims. The city of Santa Teresa (a fictional version of Ciudad Juárez) in 2666 takes on the role of a sinister vortex of evil, one of unknown roots and global reach. The unending series of murders becomes an allegory for Latin America’s current age of violence.

In the last book of 2666, we are introduced to the life of the mythical writer Archimboldi, beginning in rural Germany in the 1930s and concluding as he prepares to fly to Mexico, where his nephew has been jailed as a suspect in the serial murders of Santa Teresa. One of the most compelling episodes of 2666 takes place on the Soviet front during WWII, when the young Archimboldi deserts his army regiment and takes refuge in a semi-abandoned town in the Russian countryside. He discovers the journal of an avant-garde Moscow poet, which has been stashed in a hiding place behind the chimney of the cottage where he stays. The journal is written by a Jewish poet, born in 1909, who recounts his gradual alienation from the Soviet Revolution, during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. The poet, named Borís Abramovich Ansky, recounts his effort to balance an imposed revolutionary consciousness with his own aesthetic vision, an endeavor doomed to failure as the revolution begins to demand ideological purity from its artists. Bolaño’s mordant critique of 20th century Latin American intellectuals, on the ideological left and right, seeps into the events of Ansky’s life at times. This is how Bolaño comments on an anecdote Archimboldi reads in the journal which describes how Ansky falls in love with a beautiful girl in Moscow:


“And Nadja Yurenieva saw Ansky and discreetely got up and left the assembly hall where the bad Soviet poet (as unconscious and ignorant and affected and timorous and fussy as a Mexican lyric poet, actually just like a Latin American lyric poet, those pathetic phenomenons, skimpy and vain) dispersed his rhymes about the production of iron (using the same arrogant ignorance with which Latin American poets speak of their I, of their age, of their otherness), and she went out into the streets of Moscow, followed by Ansky, who wouldn’t get close to her but instead remained at a distance, some five meters behind her, a distance that shrank as time passed and the walk prolonged itself.”


Both of Bolaño’s long novels develop a critique of the failure of Latin America’s intellectuals, those who theorize globalization as well as those who proclaim a revolutionary faith, who always fail to grasp certain nightmarish realities surrounding them, both approaches often helping to exacerbate economic, social and political degeneration. Bolaño explicitly avoids revolutionary allegiances, always remaining a critic, a Baudelarian observer whose only faith is to be found in the poem, in the act of creating the book itself.

The tension between revolutionary vanguards and poetic avant-gardes is central to Dalton’s work, from his earliest poems in the 1950s to the autobiographical episodes and anarchic bohemia of Pobrecito poeta que era yo…. In the fourth book of his novel, a young writer addresses a dichotomy he finds between art and politics:


“I believe the Revolution should have a politics for dealing with me, for dealing with people who, like me, don’t do anything other than reflect, with the most acute evidence (I can’t say whether this is due to talent or irresponsibility), on the complications of the world today whose transformation will be achieved by the revolutionaries. Amen.”


In his own life. Dalton maintained a faith in utopian politics (even if in a critical manner), while his novel and much of his poetry explore the contradictions of the artist’s place within revolutionary thought. Bolaño’s two major novels often seem to dismantle the revolutionary impulse, exposing it as merely another 20th century fiction. His brutal fourth book recounting the murders in Ciudad Juárez fulfills the apocalyptic tone of the Charles Baudelaire epigraph that opens 2666:


“An oasis of horror amidst
A desert of tedium.”


These are preliminary notes on two poets who demand a much deeper analysis. But I would like to suggest that 2666 cannot be understood without returning to that brief encounter between Dalton and Bolaño in San Salvador, during the tumultuous mid-1970s. Like his revolutionary mentor and fellow nomad, Bolaño chose to transform his poetry through the use of a relatively bourgeois form, the novel. Both poets understood that the novel can be deconstructed and expanded for multiple purposes, including the liberating effect of experimentation and ideological anarchism. 2666 and Pobrecito poeta que era yo… acknowledge the material futility of the poet’s existence in Latin America, a futility that might perhaps be undermined through the collective act implied by the form of the novel.

Yet another conduit between these two writers, one that requires its own essay, is their predilection for the “antipoetry” of Nicanor Parra (1914). Bolaño was vocal in his admiration for Parra, and Dalton likewise admired the Chilean poet’s irreverent approach to his art. For both of them, Parra's skeptical, humorous poetry served as a model for how literature might be enacted as camouflage against tedium. Much like Baudelaire did in the 19th century, Parra’s Poemas y antipoemas (1954) offered a radical critique of the way poetry was being conceived by most of his peers. Parra proposed a rhetorical break from the transcendent and the baroque by means of an ironic simplicity, a stance one finds throughout Dalton and Bolaño’s expansive postmodern novels. Poetry, as Parra understands it, could use the demotic to return the poet to a practical yet subversive use of daily language. Thus allowing literature to be built from the absurdities that individuals face when trying to maintain a distinct path. The collective is adhered to at intervals, but always filtered through the poet’s dissenting standpoint:


“I am the Individual.
But no. I grew bored with the things I was doing,
The fire bothered me,
I wanted to see more,
I am the Individual.
I went down to a valley irrigated by a river.
I found what I needed there,
I came across a savage town,
A tribe,
I am the Individual.
I saw they did a few things there,
They engraved figures on the rocks,
They made fire, they made fire too!
I am the Individual.
They asked me where I was coming from.
I answered that yes, that I had no set plans,
I answered that no, that from then on.
Good.
Then I grabbed a piece of rock I found in a river
And began to work with it,
I began to polish it,
I made part of my own life out of it.”
(“Soliloquio del Individuo”)


Anderson’s notion that the roots of the postmodern are to be found in Latin America is vividly enacted by the late novels of these two iconoclastic poets. Their work pulses with a sense of simultaneously belonging to (and being alienated from) canonical Western and marginal “Third World” cultures. They explicitly reject the notion that their subject matter and style be limited to national or biographical experiences, choosing instead to create radical portraits of the global ages they each inhabited. Bolaño never wrote extensively about his experiences in El Salvador, but it seems evident that Dalton’s death would have affected him personally and aesthetically. That singular and horrific event may have served him as a warning that poetry is an impulse that cannot be girded by any political ideology. Dalton’s murder would have reminded him of the challenge poetry represents against those who would impose a single method or morality. This is why they are both so relevant to our polarized situation today, because they propose a type of poetic novel whose form inherently challenges dogmatism. Finally, one hopes the forthcoming translations of Roberto Bolaño’s two major novels might lead to an eventual English version of Roque Dalton's undeservedly obscure masterpiece.





Bibliography
Anderson, Perry, The Origins of Postmodernity, London, Verso, 1998.
Bolaño, Roberto, 2666, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2004.
Bolaño, Roberto, “Entrevista,” Lateral: Revista de Cultura, No. 40, April 1998.
Dalton, Roque, Pobrecito poeta que era yo..., San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2005.
Parra, Nicanor, Poemas y antipoemas, Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1995.




[All translations from the Spanish here are my own.]




*Author’s Note (2/18/2015)
I wrote this essay after noticing a fragment in a 2005 feature about Bolaño in The New York Times by Larry Rohter, “A Writer Whose Posthumous Novel Crowns an Illustrious Career.” I was intrigued by Rohter’s suggestion that Bolaño had met Dalton in San Salvador in the mid-1970s: “After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible [...].” However, as Miguel Huezo Mixco eventually proved in his 2011 essay “Roberto Bolaño en El Salvador. Supremo jardín de la guerra florida,” Dalton and Bolaño never met in El Salvador.

San Salvador

About 15 minutes before we landed in San Salvador, our plane flew by a massive volcano somewhere in the countryside surrounded by nothing but farms and wilderness. Looking on a map later on, I guessed this might be the Chinchontepec volcano, a beautiful sight from the airplane window. San Salvador itself is in a picturesque valley of volcanoes and hills, under and through which the city grows at an astonishing pace which you can measure by the construction going on everywhere. As the sun rises, you wake up to a multitude of birds singing just as many songs on the tree branches outside your window.

I was in San Salvador to assist C. with research she's conducting on Roque Dalton (1935-1975), so that most of the week was spent learning about his chaotic and prolific life and career. As I learn more about his life and work, his writing strikes me as one of the most important and vibrant literary projects Latin America has ever seen. As I've written here before, I'm especially fascinated by the brief encounter that occurred sometime in late 1973 or early 1974 between Dalton and Roberto Bolaño in San Salvador. Dalton had returned to El Salvador from Cuba on Christmas Day 1973, in order to join a small group of leftist guerrillas in the struggle to bring a revolution to his country.

I haven't been able to find any information on when exactly Bolaño arrived in San Salvador (he never published an account of his time there and his references in interviews are brief), but I believe it would have been after his escape from Chile, as he made his way back up to Mexico fleeing the overthrow of Salvador Allende. From the time he arrived in El Salvador in late 1973 until he was assassinated by his own "comrades" in the ERP, Dalton lived clandestine in San Salvador. Having been marginally associated with a revolutionary group for a few months in Santiago de Chile and having escaped jail and certain death there, Bolaño would have been clandestine as well during his time in San Salvador.


Bolaño was approximately 20 years old and Dalton was about 38 when they met. I imagine poetry and the events in Chile would have been topics of conversation between them. (Dalton studied at the University of Chile in the 1950s.) From what I've gathered, when he was in hiding in San Salvador, Dalton was writing the explicitly political poems that would later be gathered under the title Poemas clandestinos, along with essays on political theory. He left El Salvador during that period on at least one occasion, going to Mexico City. When he left Havana in late 1973, he abandoned his family and two incomplete novels waiting to be finished.

In a book-length study of the poet that I found during my visit, El ciervo perseguido: Vida y obra de Roque Dalton (San Salvador: CONCULTURA, 2004), Luis Alvarenga discusses how Dalton once posed the following choice during a lecture in Havana: whether he should focus his energy on his newfound interest in experimental fiction, or if he should devote his attention to participating in revolutionary activity in his homeland. He chose the later, and his senseless death points to his having made a mistake. As his masterpiece novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo... (1976) proves, he was well on his way to creating a completely new collage-style, experimental type of novel. His completed novel will one day be understood as a masterpiece of the Latin American Boom, as important and extraordinary as anything by his friends Julio Cortázar or José Lezama Lima.

A book like Pobrecito poeta que era yo... is definitely an influence on Bolaño's two major texts, Los detectives salvajes (1998) and 2666 (2004), in that they are all obsessed with documenting the literary and political vanguards of Latin America in the second half of the XX century. Both writers use poetry as a base for their fiction, allowing experimentalism to saturate their frantic and multitudinous prose. All three novels provide eclectic portraits of literary bohemias in San Salvador, Mexico City, and elsewhere. Much of my time in San Salvador last week was spent with these two writers in mind, imagining what their encounters and relationships with that city were like.

I was also visiting as many bookstores as time would allow. I came across a series of books on Venezuela that I've been trying to procure for years now, published by Editorial Debate. I also purchased several Dalton titles published by UCA Editores, and the first volume of his collected poems [Roque Dalton, No pronuncies mi nombre: Poesía completa, ed. Rafael Lara Martínez (San Salvador: CONCULTURA, 2005)]. I found a handful of other texts that I hope to discuss here in the coming months.


San Salvador is a massive city and one week was barely enough time to begin to investigate its multiple zones. One day we had the fortune of driving up to the top of the San Salvador volcano that overlooks the city (see 1st photo above), where we looked down into the crater known as El Boquerón, which hasn't been active since 1917. Stopping for a drink at a coffee plantation on the other side of the volcano, you can look out across the beautiful countryside to where Honduras begins. The natural landscape always overwhelmed me around San Salvador, rugged and dry (at this time of year), prolific and never quite conquered by the city.

I was often reminded of Caracas as we explored San Salvador. It has the same chaos of automobiles and pedestrians, the same polluted air filtered through vast green mountains, and a similar hyper-contrast of wealth and poverty. Like the center of Caracas, San Salvador's center is overrun with street vendors. That area's beautiful XIX century and art deco buildings are in dire need of restoration, covered in grime from the polluted air and mostly unsafe for pedestrians who don't know their way around. Countless buildings seemed to have been abandoned, such as the Teatro Darío movie theater (see photo above).

Literary culture is marginalized in San Salvador, as it is in almost all the major cities of Latin America. The bookstores always had titles I was interested in, but there was an extreme lack of selections from many Latin American authors. For instance, I was looking for several books by contemporary Mexican writers and was surprised to find that none of them were available, even though Mexico is not that far away. To take the case of Dalton, people in El Salvador know who he is but often haven't read his work. He's frequently seen (and manipulated for political purposes) as a revolutionary poet, but the broad range of his work – poetry, fiction, literary criticism, political theory, journalism, memoir – is ignored.

Of course, there are institutions in San Salvador devoted to literature, such as the café La Luna, the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, or the Casa del Escritor. But my impression is that those places are exceptions. In El Salvador, as in the rest of Latin America, poetry is a minority interest. I could obviously be wrong in this assessment, since I was only there for 8 days. But going back to Dalton, he was relentless in his critique of El Salvador's political and literary landscapes, pointing out how the middle and upper classes constantly gravitate toward conservatism and mediocrity. One could argue, surely, that this is simply a symptom of our globalized age, when capitalism has saturated every corner of our existence. And really, where in our world today is poetry not marginal and misunderstood?


There was a mood or feeling that kept washing over me while I was in San Salvador. I couldn't help but remember that the peace accords for El Salvador's bloody civil war were only signed 15 years ago. Dalton's death in 1975 marked the beginning of an extremely violent decade-and-a-half, but it was merely one among thousands and thousands of killings. The main parties in power today are ARENA (associated in the past with the government death squads of the civil war) and FMLN (derived from the revolutionary movement that itself was also guilty of many war crimes). The political process seems to be deadlocked between these two sides, though my ignorance of the minutae of Salvadoran politics prevents me from commenting further.

While the country's economy is doing quite well, specters of the nation's violent history continue to haunt it today. One direct example is the frightening rise in organized criminal violence (such as the infamous and transnational Mara Salvatrucha gang), a direct consequence of the civil war years. Dalton's youngest son, the filmmaker Jorge Dalton has just released an excellent documentary, “Entre los muertos,” that addresses the way death has become such a familiar presence in El Salvador. His film has been shown at festivals in Spain and Nicaragua, and hopefully will make it here to the U.S. because it's well worth seeing.

Its tense atmosphere is partly why San Salvador reminds me so much of Caracas. They're both dangerous and violent cities organized around the extreme wealth of a minority and the grinding poverty of a majority. One can see no clear exit to these situations of poverty, inequality and injustice with such established historical roots. I find it completely sad and reactionary, however, that solutions to economic oppression are sought by the masses in dictatorial figures such as Che, Fidel or Chávez.


[All photos by C.M.]

The Savage Detectives

The English translation of Roberto Bolaño's novel Los detectives salvajes (Anagrama, 1998), which was awarded the Premio Rómulo Gallegos in Caracas, will be published next month in an edition by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I'm not sure how the English version will sound, though I imagine Bolaño's novel is devastating in any language. In the current issue of The Believer (March 2007), Argentine novelist Rodrigo Fresán writes about his friendship with Bolaño. He discusses the ambitious scope of Bolaño's novels and his iconoclastic critique of the ideological left and right in Latin America.

Among the many reasons to love Bolaño's work is its irreverence towards the writers of the Boom generation and its unwillingness to play along with revolutionary rhetoric, which he understood as useless repetitions. His friendship with the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton when they were clandestine in San Salvador in the mid-1970s was probably an influence on his work. Parallels can be discerned between Dalton's posthumous revolutionary novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo (1976) and Bolaño's posthumous epic, 2666.

In his essay “The Savage Detective,” Fresán cites an e-mail he received from Bolaño on the topic of political engagement among Latin American writers:

“Deep down, the problem is schizophrenia, isn't it? Something like what happens to leftist militants whose discourse is really rightist and who nevertheless still insist on being leftists. And so we get, for example, a left that supports Castro's dictatorship.”

(Anti) Utopian

This weekend, I'm continuing with the essay on Roque Dalton and Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novels. Writing this essay, I’ve faced the same difficulties with the blank page that I do with poems. Which tells me I’m dealing with a subject close to my own goals or desires for literature. I’m approaching this text as a form of poetry. An essay that tries to act as a poem does, through a similar access to “spirits,” or “echoes,” taken from elsewhere.

In the case of these two authors, I’m discussing poets whose work I admire deeply, whose novels have helped point out possible directions for Latin American letters today, radical propositions in form, and in facing the specter of violence that continues to grow throughout the region. The fourth book within Bolaño’s 2666, for instance, can be interpreted as an effort to confront and lament the horrifying evil behind the still-unsolved murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez. A sign of our current passage through an age inundated with evil.

Bolaño’s work is necessarily darker than Dalton’s, since the former is explicit in his abandonment of any form of utopian solution, political or aesthetic. Not that Bolaño is rejecting the utopian elements of literature but rather, he finds it impossible to do anything but acknowledge the immense weight of terror that surrounds and suffuses our lives today. Dalton’s characters, spanning the Salvadoran avant garde of the late 1950s and early 1960s, still hold true to a belief in political and aesthetic emancipation. Dalton’s prose is ironic, confrontational, bohemian and expansive, at times evoking Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s irreverent games with the Spanish language. And yet, Dalton finished Pobrecito poeta que era yo in Havana in 1973, shortly before he returned to El Salvador to take up arms against the dictatorship.

Driving my essay is the brief friendship that developed between Dalton and Bolaño in San Salvador sometime in the mid-seventies. Dalton was a legendary and respected poet at the time, his work already translated into various languages, well on his way to his current reputation as El Salvador’s most prominent writer. Bolaño was still a kid, fresh from his experiences in Chile’s 1973 coup, where he barely survived being killed as a supporter of Allende. Bolaño’s life-long nomadic exile was just beginning. One imagines Dalton might have discussed the novel he had just finished, in his conversations with the younger poet. One might even assume the friendship unfolded, at least partly, as a literary mentorship.

*

In recent months, the Venezuelan novelist Adriano González León has been writing a column for El Nacional every Thursday. González León was a member of the early 1960s writers & artists collective El Techo de la Ballena, and in 1968 he won the Biblioteca Breve prize in Spain for his now-classic novel País portátil (which juxtaposes postmodern urban guerrillas and the XIX century era of the rural caudillos). In his column yesterday, González León writes about his own fear of the blank page, the difficulty it presents for many writers:


“Siempre, aunque sea tarde, el asunto llega. Esta vez ha sido muy pronto. No hay tema para tantos lectores amigos. Digo amigos porque así lo pregonan los correos electrónicos recibidos. Cierto tipo de público piensa que el escritor siempre debe estar escribiendo.

No sé por qué. Del músico no exigen que esté presente todos los días con el instrumento en la mano. Al pintor no le piden que maneje su pincel, el marcador o el instrumento electrónico para pintar. Al escultor no le exigen que todos los días golpee con su hierro, martillo, compresor o martillo electrónico.

Los escritores parece que hubieran contraído otra obligación. Y no es así. No fue siempre así. Hay escritores de innumerables textos, como Balzac, y han gravitado sobre la historia. Hay escritores con más títulos que Balzac y nadie sabe quiénes son. Pero sobre todo La Ilíada y La Odisea, La Divina Comedia, El Quijote, Crimen y Castigo, La Montaña Mágica, Ulises y Pedro Páramo están siempre allí, dirigiendo el sueño y la imaginación de los hombres.

¿Por qué semejantes exigencias no se hacen a los pintores, músicos, escultores? Y cosa curiosa, son los artistas con mayor dedicación a su trabajo. Pero pareciera que la fórmula, “¿qué estás escribiendo?,” les da a los preguntones una categoría que no tienen, justamente por su indiscreción y su necedad. Tremenda afrenta esa de la página en blanco.

Terrible cuando acosa la pereza. Y tres veces más grave si se trata de que ha cundido el desencanto y la tristeza. Todo el mundo se pregunta “¿Qué le pasaría a Juan Rulfo?” Y me acuerdo que una vez, en un congreso de los usuales, a alguien se le ocurrió la pregunta. Él dijo con su peculiar lentitud y lejanía: “Es que estaba enterrando unos muertos en Luvina.” […]”


(Adriano González León, “Camino y misterio de la escritura,” El Nacional, 27 Abril 2006)