Itinerant Verses: Ali Lameda's Poetics of Solidarity from Venezuela to North Korea

Abstract The North Korean Department of Foreign Publications hired venerated Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda in 1966 to work as a Spanish-language translator in Pyongyang. After he criticized the North Korean government in 1967, security officials arrested Lameda. During two separate terms of imprisonment — punctuated by an intervening show trial that led to a conviction of twenty years’ forced labor — Lameda continued to produce poetry. Following appeals from the Venezuelan government, the Communist Party of Venezuela, and the human rights organization Amnesty International, the North Korean government released Lameda in 1974. Drawing from materials including Lameda's poetry, composed throughout his confinement; from introductory essays and reflections published in Lameda's volumes of poetry; from Korean-language periodicals (Nodong Sinmun; Chosŏn Munhak); and documentation from Amnesty International, this article examines history at the scale of an individual, a state, and a human rights organization. It argues that poetic practice as refracted through these scales complicated revolutionary visions of a unified, Third World – led, anti-imperialist future, and that historicizing Lameda's poetry reveals what human rights claims obscure.