The Dialectics of Irreverence and Commemoration in Roque Dalton’s Un libro rojo para Lenin

I read Roque Dalton’s posthumous work Un libro rojo para Lenin as a model to help us recover the urgency of the revolutionary legacy of the 1960s in Latin American letters. Through Dalton we can learn how to inherit this tradition amidst the triumphant discourses of the end of history, the dawning of globalization, and the need to reinvent the Left after the collapse of real socialist projects. I analyze the concepts of memory, commemoration, legacy, and inheritance understood in the context of Dalton’s irreverent and revolutionary conception of history. In order to inherit Lenin’s thought, Dalton establishes a critical distance from it and consciously recovers the moment in Lenin’s writings about the revolutionary struggle, before Lenin has come to power. This moment of revolutionary potential embodies the utopian spirit that Dalton wishes to “translate” to the Latin American revolution. This legacy that Dalton intends to recover is found in a book that seems to erase the boundaries between the political pamphlet and poetry. This radical project is characteristic of his continued attempt to reconcile the political vanguard with his unflinching commitment to the aesthetic avant-garde. This tension between the aesthetic and political is evident in Dalton’s proposed solution to inheriting Lenin’s legacy in Latin America: along with the work of mourning, we must employ the work of irony. Irony will establish the necessary critical distance to inherit Lenin in a Latin American context.