El Salvador's Poet of Recovery.

• Author: Bencastro, Mario
• Position: Manilo Argueta

Award-winning writer Manlio Argueta captures the struggles and dreams of his fellow Central Americans in lyrical works revealing harsh realities

In 1972, the social climate of El Salvador foretold a violent civil war that would last twelve years. At that time, writer Manlio Argueta went to Costa Rica, where he would remain in exile for twenty years. In this adopted land he would write three novels, including his best known work, Un dia en la vida [One Day of Life], which would be translated into ten languages and avidly read the world over by readers who, primarily through it, would come to know the roots of the social conflict in Argueta's homeland.

The origins of this decorated wordsmith are humble, as he himself admits. "I was born in 1935 into a very modest home in San Miguel. I have written two of my works in the house where I lived as a child and my interest in literature began."

Argueta's long and fruitful literary career began with the most traditional and most popular genre in El Salvador, poetry, and, at age twenty, he obtained two national first prizes. Later he enrolled at the National University, where he joined the writers of the Circulo Literario Universitario, or University Literary Circle, founded by countryman Roque Dalton and other writers who, inspired by poems such as Oswaldo Escobar Velado's "Patria exacta," would form what came to be called the generacion comprometida, or committed generation.

Argueta recalls his first encounter with the legendary Dalton. "He and Roberto Armijo came to see me at my home when I won two prizes in 1956. I was very moved. I remember the great camaraderie that existed in the circle, with Otto Rene Castillo, Roque Dalton, Roberto Armijo, Roberto Cea, and Tirso Canales." From this group would emerge the region's most important poets of the period.

The circle had as its motto, "There is no aesthetic without ethics." Argueta reveals that one of the intellectual advisors of this historic group of writers was none other than Miguel Angel Asturias. "At the time he was the Guatemalan ambassador to El Salvador. He used to say that the poet is a social conduit." Asturias was removed from his post with the fall of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Years later, in 1967, as the Guatemalan ambassador to France, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Dalton had an almost overpowering influence on young poets, due to his political militancy and his strength as an intellectual and a poet, but with Argueta it was different. "He influenced me after his death. Because it forced me to become introspective, to evaluate especially what I could do. I thought, `Roque isn't going to write anymore; I'm going to write with the same dedication that he would if he were alive.' It was something I internalized, driven a little by anger because he had been assassinated [in 1975].

Argueta's poetic influences can be found in writers such as Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo especially, as well as Ramon Lopez Velarde and the...