[In the following review of Un libro levemente odioso, a posthumous collection of Dalton's poetry, Menton singles out for special praise Dalton's poems questioning orthodox communist ideology.]

Roque Dalton is unquestionably El Salvador's most internationally known writer, in part because of his revolutionary activities in Cuba and his execution by Salvadoran guerrillas in May 1975. However, his fame also rests solidly on his literary production: Las historias prohibidas del Pulgarcito (1974), an anecdotal, multigeneric history of his country, comparable to Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Vista del amanecer en el trópico and Eduardo Galeano's trilogy Memoria del fuego; the five-hundred-page posthumous biography of Miguel Mármol; and several volumes of poetry.

The work under review [Un libro levemente odioso] is a handsome collection of poems written between 1965 and 1971, illustrated by José Luis Posada, with an introduction by Elena Poniatowska. As the ironic title indicates, it is a book full of hate: hate for the dogmatic orthodoxy, both Catholic and communist; hate for all forms of U.S. and British imperialism; hate for pompous, unprincipled lawyers; and hate for self-serving poets. The most frequent leitmotivs are religion, sex, and intertextuality. Surrealistic and absurdist metonymies alternate with the banal language of antipoetry. The form varies from the one-to-seven-line “minipoemas para visualizar” to the two-page proselike narrative account of how the poet was beaten up one night in Prague by unknown thugs.

Among the more successful techniques is the one-word-to-a-line enumeration in “Los H.P. (Hijos Pródigos)” and “Prohibido para mayores.” The former refers to the English soldiers who, after killing a series of Third World nationalities, return home to their Christian culture, to their Western civilization, in order to kill the Irish. “Prohibido para mayores” lends itself to more than one interpretation. It opens with eleven lines of sexually charged diminutives followed by a matter-of-fact observation that the dolls and the Lone Ranger pistols will lie abandoned until a mother realizes what is happening. The most interesting poems, however, are those that reveal the poet's own difficulties with the communist world, which ultimately leads to his tragic death: “Polémica,” “Gerontofagia pero …,” “Saudade,” “El Che en Praga en 1965,” and several others.