Roque Dalton

After four hours of torture, the Apache and the other two
cops threw a bucket of water at the prisoner to wake him up
and said: "The Colonel has ordered us to tell you you're to be
given a chance to save your skin. If you guess which of us has
...

El Salvador will be a beautiful
and without exception, a dignified country
when the working class and the people of the countryside
enrich it, bathe, powder and groom it,
when they cure the historical hangover
and add enough to it by a hundred fold
to reconstitute it
and start it moving along.

The problem is that today El Salvador
has a thousand incentives and a hundred thousand inequalities,
cancers, castoffs, dandruff, filth,
sores, fractures, weak knees and offensive breath.

A few machetes will be given it
also restored self esteem, turpentine, penicillin,
bathrooms with toilets and toilets with seats,
kisses and gunpowder.

Translated from the Spanish by Zoë Anglesey.
...

In ancient Greece
Aristotle taught philosophy to his disciples
while they walked across a large courtyard.

Because of this his school was called "the peripatetic."

Fighting poets
are peripateticker than those Aristotelian peripatetics
because we apprehend the philosophy and poetry of the people
while traveling
through the cities and mountains of our land.

Translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman.
...

Whoever tells you our love is extraordinary
because it was born of extraordinary circumstances
tell him we're struggling now
so that a love like ours
(a love among comrades in battle)
becomes
the most ordinary and flowing,
almost unparalleled,
love in El Salvador.
...

I wanted to talk about life in all the corners
filled with song I wanted to join a river of words
the dreams and the names what is not said
in the newspapers the agony of the lonely
caught in the folds of the rain
reclaim the bare parables of the lovers and leave them
at the feet of a child's game
elaborating their sweet daily destruction
I wanted to pronounce the syllables of the people
the songs of their anguish
point out where the heart is lame
to say who alone deserves a shot
in the back to tell of my own country
lay down the exodus of the large
migrations that opened all the paths of the world
of love even dragged over there
by the ditches to talk to you about trains
and my friend who killed himself with another's knife
of the history of all of the people torn
from the blindness of the myth of reefs
the century that will end with my three sons
of the tongues of the birds and the furious foam
of the great quadrupeds' stampede
and I wanted to tell you about the Revolution
and about Cuba and the Soviet Union
and about the woman I love because of her eyes
of the smallest storms
and of your lives filled with sunrise
and asking people who saw it who said that
how could it be done I got here
ahead of you
and of all of the things of nature
and of the heart and its testimony
of the last fingerprint before annihilation
of the little animals and of tenderness
I wanted to say yes all that and tell
a lot of the stories I know and were told to me in my time
and all that I learned living in sorrow's big room
the things that were said by the poets before me
and that it was good to know

And I could not give you more—closed door
of poetry—
than my own headless body in the sand of the ring.

(trans. by Anne Boyer)
...