A Conversation With Carolyn Forché at Dissent

With Patrick Iber, Carolyn Forché discusses "her work and career in poetry and politics." Most recently, Forché is the author of What You Have Heard Is True (a memoir) and a collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World, published last month. Let's pick up with the start of their conversation: 

Patrick Iber: How did your journey to El Salvador begin?

Carolyn Forché: I could begin with the day I heard a vehicle in my driveway and was not expecting anyone. But it really begins earlier, when I befriended a young woman who was married to a colleague of mine at San Diego State University. She was the daughter of a poet and kept telling me to read her mother’s poetry. Finally I did, and I was astonished to learn that although her mother’s poetry had been translated into a number of other languages, it had never been translated into English, and she was quite a formidable poet from Central America.

Iber: This was Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría.

Forché: Yes. [Her daughter Patricia] and I decided to translate her together, which presented significant challenges not so much because of my Spanish (which was not very good) but because of my unfamiliarity with living conditions under dictatorships in Latin America. So Patricia suggested that I come with her to Majorca, Spain, to stay with her parents. Her mother would tell us the stories behind the poems and help us to come to an English translation that we felt did justice to the Spanish versions. That summer was really transformative for me. I spent my afternoons on Claribel’s terrace sitting just outside the circle of her various guests, who gathered every afternoon to talk about politics and literature. From them I learned a great deal about the dirty wars in Argentina and Chile, and much that was going on in Paraguay and Uruguay at the time. Many of her guests were exiles from those countries, so I was just trying to keep up, both with Spanish and with the realities that were opening to me. I began to realize that there was a common denominator in these stories: the support of the U.S. government for these military dictatorships.

I went home feeling frustrated. I was happy teaching, but I felt that there might be something more that I could do. At that moment a visitor arrived at my door with his two young daughters and turned out to be the cousin of Claribel Alegría. He stayed in my house for three days with his daughters. He covered my table with paper and began talking to me—he talked nonstop for three days and way into the night, stopping only to eat (which he was very fond of doing). He began with the whole history of Central America. By the end, he was proposing that I, as a poet, come to El Salvador soon because he believed that a war was going to begin in three to five years. This was 1977.

Read on at Dissent.