The University of El Salvador, through the Academic Vice-rector and its Collection of key books on the history of ideas in El Salvador, “ Salvadoran University Critical Thought ” ( CPSU), will present on the occasion of the 46 anniversary of the assassination of Roque Dalton (10 of May) and the 86 anniversary of his birth (1935), to the Salvadoran public, to the Salvadoran literary critic and worldwide, the two-volume Opus magnum , written by Dr. James Iffland of Boston University, To get to Roque Dalton: little hells and other paradises .
This The work inaugurates a series of classic books on Salvadoran thought that the Academic Vice President will publish throughout the year, including works by Rafael Menjívar, David Luna, Juan Mario Castellanos, Fabio Castillo Figueroa, Mélida Anaya Montes, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, Matilde El ena López, Rafael Arce Zablah, Víctor Valle, among others.
Roque Dalton has long ceased to be the National Poet of El Salvador to become a genuine representative of the best poetry written on a planetary level not only of the twentieth century but of all time. Poet who can be compared to Li Po, Marcial, Cátulo, Omar Khayyam, Quevedo, but also Vallejo, Neruda, Constantin Cavafis or Nazim Hikmet.
He is the most universal of Salvadoran poets who managed to bring to his maximum development, through unpublished paths and through fertile and unknown territories, a poetic expression that summarizes the national and the global, the particular and the universal, achieving in a masterful way summarize what we could dare to outline as the genuine expression of Salvadoranity, the “invention” of the national soul, if the word fits, to define the critical points of our identity as Salvadorans, as Latin Americans, as humans.
Dr. James Iffland has taught Spanish and Latin American literature at Boston University since 1974 to date and is one of the world authorities on Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, a leading specialist in the poetry of Francisco de Qu evedo and Villegas and the literature of the Spanish Golden Age, respected by the highest authorities of the Kingdom of Spain, including an acknowledgment of King Felipe himself for his Cervantine studies.
The work of Roque Dalton aroused his interest, to the extent of dedicating more than twenty-five years dedicated to studying the literary work of Roque Dalton, where he discovers his great poetry, his brilliant cultivation of the genre of testimony, Miguel Mármol, the events of 1932 , his novel, Poor little poet who was me … , his literary and political essays, César Vallejo or ¿Revolution in the revolution? And the right-wing critic , a brilliant plea in defense of the guerrilla focus theory and the theses of his friend, the French Régis Débray. It also analyzes Dalton’s facet related to the cultivation of theater and revolutionary theory.
All these facets of the man of letters and thinker Roque Dalton are studied meticulously, with the diligence of a detective or the precision of a watchmaker jeweler, through the critical eye of a specialist of the greats of world literature such as Quevedo and Cervantes, and in this case, our classic, Roque Dalton García.