Roque Dalton

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Roque Dalton (1969)

Roque Dalton (born May 14, 1935 in San Salvador , † May 10, 1975 in Quezaltepeque ) was a poet and journalist from El Salvador .

Life

Roque Dalton García was born in 1935 to the illegitimate son of the wealthy American entrepreneur Winall Dalton and the Salvadoran nurse María García Medrano.

Dalton attended an exclusive Jesuit school in San Salvador. He then studied law in Santiago de Chile at the Universidad Nacional de Chile. There he met radical left students and the famous painter Diego Rivera . These acquaintances aroused his enthusiasm for the ideas of socialism.

After his return to El Salvador, he began to study law at the Universidad Nacional de El Salvador. In 1955 he founded the literary circle Circulo Literario Universitario . Dalton was very active politically. He joined the Communist Party. In 1959 he was arrested and sentenced to death. The day before his execution, President José María Lemus López was overthrown; this saved Dalton from execution. After his release, he went into exile in Mexico. In his books, El turno del ofendido and La ventana en el rostro , written in exile, he reports on these events.

In 1961 Dalton traveled to Cuba, where he stayed until 1965. Dalton returned to El Salvador that year, but was soon arrested again and sentenced to death. He escaped execution again: an earthquake collapsed the walls of his prison and he managed to escape to Cuba. From there he was posted to Prague as a correspondent for The International Review . There he wrote Taberna y otros lugares and the biography of Miguel Mármols . Among other things , he received the Premio Casas de las Américas in 1969 for his great poem La taberna .

Dalton became a prominent figure on the Salvadoran left. He trained as a guerrilla in Cuban military camps . In 1973 he offered himself to the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación (FPL) as a fighter. However, their leader Salvador Cayetano Carpio rejected him, pointing out that his role in the revolution was that of a poet, not that of a soldier. Then Dalton joined the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP). In this "People's Revolutionary Army" the undogmatic Dalton soon clashed with the Marxist leadership. He was accused of wanting to split the organization. After a "Revolutionary Tribunal" sentenced him to death, his comrades executed Roque Dalton on May 10, 1975.

Trial of the murderers

The criminal case for the murder of two former guerrilla commanders, Joaquín Villalobos and Jorge Meléndez, was suspended by a court in San Salvador on January 9, 2012 due to a statute of limitations. Villalobos had admitted complicity in the murder in 1993.

Works

  • Mía junto a los pájaros, 1957
  • La ventana en el rostro, 1961
  • El mar, 1962
  • El turno del ofendido, 1962
  • Los testimonios, 1964
  • Poemas, 1968
  • Taberna y otros lugares, 1969
  • Los pequenos infiernos, 1970

Works in German translation

  • Y otros lugares / And other places . Poems spanish - german. Stroemfeld Verlag, Basel 1981. ISBN 3-87877-143-6 .
  • Poor little poet that I was . Novel. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 1986. ISBN 3-85869-034-1 .
  • I dreamed of snakes ( Una experiencia personal ), in: Carlos Rincón (ed.): Explorations. 50 storytellers from Central America , Berlin (Volk und Welt publishing house) 1988, SS 280–289.
  • Thumbling Forbidden Stories . Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 1989. ISBN 3-85869-054-6 .
  • The world is a limping centipede. The century of Miguel Mármol . Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 1997. ISBN 3-85869-072-4 .

Movie

  • Tina Leisch : Roque Dalton. ¡Fusilemos la noche !, Let's shoot the night !, Let's shoot the night! , Austria, El Salvador, Cuba 2013, 86 min.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ EW: Roque Dalton: Das lyrische Werk , in: Walter Jens (Hrsg.): Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon , Vol. 4. Munich 1996, pp. 394–396-
  2. ^ Heidrun Zinecker: El Salvador after the civil war . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-593-37459-5 , p. 41.
  3. ↑ Cecibel Romero: The death of the poet remains unpunished. In: taz, January 11, 2012.
  4. ↑ Interview with Joaquín Villalobos in the Mexican newspaper Excelsior, May 19, 1993. Word reaches of interviews archived copy ( Memento of the original on 17 March 2012 at the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved January 20, 2012. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rdarchivo.contrapunto.com.sv
personal data
SURNAME Dalton, Roque
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Salvadoran poet and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH San Salvador , El Salvador
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1975
Place of death Quezaltepeque , El Salvador