Un libro levemente odioso

A major collection from the revolutionary Salvadoran poet and intellectual in a new bilingual edition.

“Profound yet playful, the poet Roque preferred to laugh at himself than take life too seriously, and so saved himself from grandiloquence, solemnity, and other ailments so gravely afflicting Latin American political poetry.” —Eduardo Galeano, Roque

The most important posthumous collection of the “patron saint of the Latin American left” (Ben Ehrenreich, London Review of Books) is a fierce satire. Only the holy trinity of Lenin-Fidel Castro-Che Guevara escapes his sharp-edged mockery. These are nasty poems, but never unjustly so. He denounces the cruel hypocrisy of his enemies (the Salvadoran dictatorship, US imperialism, the international bourgeoisie) and his comrades, which ultimately lands him on the enemy side of civil violence. The mirror he holds up to revolutionaries and poets who fail to live up to their words turns to reveal an endearingly flawed and tragicomic figure. Only his cynicism is a pretense, armor for his idealism. The autobiographical poems in this collection mythologize the author’s life, turning him into the unwilling martyr of a mystical revolution that continues to enlist those naïve enough to believe poetry can be political.ROQUE DALTON (1935–1975) was an enormously influential figure in the history of Latin America as a poet, essayist, intellectual, and revolutionary. As a poet who brilliantly fused politics and art, his example permanently changed the direction of Central American poetry. The author of eighteen volumes of poetry and prose, one of which (Taberna y otros lugares) received a Casa de las Américas prize in 1967, his work combines fierce satirical irony with a humane and exuberant tenderness. Dalton was murdered by his ERP comrades on May 10, 1975, four days before turning forty. His legacy extends beyond his achievements as a poet to his political writings and political work in his native El Salvador.

NATASHA WIMMER is the award-winning translator of nine books by Roberto Bolaño, including The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her recent translations include The Twilight Zone and Voyager by Nona Fernández, and You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue. A graduate of Harvard University in Romance Languages, she has written for The Nation, The New York Times, and the New York Review of Books, and teaches at Princeton and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.

ELENA PONIATOWSKA (born in 1933 in Paris) is a Mexican journalist, novelist, and essayist known for writing about the marginalized and the powerless. One of Mexico’s most influential literary figures, she blends reportage and fiction in works such as La noche de Tlatelolco (Massacre in Mexico) and Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (Here’s to You, Jesúsa!), and was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2013.

HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA is a Honduran novelist, journalist, and essayist. The author of numerous acclaimed novels, he has also written extensively on Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, most recently in Roque Dalton: Correspondencia clandestina y otros ensayos (Penguin Random House, 2021).

JOSÉ LUIS POSADA (1929–2002) was a Spanish-born artist who died in exile in Cuba.A Bilingual Edition