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. Iber: This was Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría.įorché: Yes. 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. She was the daughter of a poet and kept telling me to read her mother’s poetry. But it really begins earlier, when I befriended a young woman who was married to a colleague of mine at San Diego State University. Patrick Iber: How did your journey to El Salvador begin?Ĭarolyn Forché: I could begin with the day I heard a vehicle in my driveway and was not expecting anyone. The interview has been edited for length. In February, I spoke to Forché about her work and career in poetry and politics. The book, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award, is now out in paperback, and Forché’s first poetry collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World, was published in March.

More recently, she wrote a memoir of her political education during those years, which takes its title from the first line of that poem: What You Have Heard Is True. Her now legendary poem “The Colonel” describes a harrowing dinner with a Salvadoran military officer. government was playing in the country’s civil war. In the 1980s, she toured extensively in the United States, reciting poetry and raising awareness about the role that the U.S. The poet Carolyn Forché’s engagement with El Salvador stretches back to the late 1970s. For this edition, Patrick Iber spoke with Carolyn Forché, author of In the Lateness of the World and What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Press). Patrick Iber ▪ April 7, 2020Ĭarolyn Forché at Georgetown University in April 2018 (Wikimedia Commons)īooked is a series of interviews about new books. The author of What You Have Heard Is True talks about her political education in El Salvador.

Carolyn forche what you have heard