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‘Poetry is there for everyone’
A new collection of work by Roque Dalton demonstrates why his revolutionary poems have such widespread appeal, says ANDY CROFT
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ROQUE DALTON (1935–1975) was one of the best-loved poets of the Latin American liberation struggles of the last century.
He was a guerilla-poet who stared death in the face many times, but his life was a triumph of revolutionary optimism: “I believe the world is beautiful,/that poetry, like bread, is there/for everyone./And that my veins don’t end in me/but in the common blood/of those battling for life,/love, things,/the landscape and bread,/poetry for everyone.”
A member of the Salvadorean Communist Party, Roque Dalton was first sentenced to death in 1960 for organising students and peasants against the local landowners. On the day of the execution his life was saved when the military dictatorship was overthrown in a coup. Incredibly, Dalton escaped death a second time in 1965 when the prison he was in was hit by an earthquake.
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