Born in El Salvador in 1935, ROQUE DALTON was a poet, essayist, intellectual, and revolutionary. As a student at the University of San Salvador, he helped found the University Literary Circle, traveled to Soviet Russia, and joined the Salvadoran Communist Party. After he was arrested in 1959 and 1960 for inciting peasant revolts and sentenced to execution by firing squad, Dalton left for exile in Mexico, and then for post-revolutionary Cuba, where he received guerrilla training and where the majority of his works were published. A poet who brilliantly fused politics and art, Dalton’s work greatly influenced Central American literature. The author of eighteen volumes of poetry and prose, his book Taberna y otros lugares, a reflection on his time spent in Prague as a correspondent for the International Review, won the Casa de las Américas prize in 1969. In 1973, Dalton clandestinely returned to El Salvador to join the armed struggle. He was murdered on May 10, 1975, four days before turning forty. Seven Stories Press is issuing bilingual editions of his poetry collections, Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle / Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases was published in 2023, and A Slightly Nasty Book / Un libro levemente odioso and Tavern and Other Places / Taberna y otros lugares, translated by Natasha Wimmer, are forthcoming.
