Prolific poet says translation is a 'labor of love'

A prolific 57-year-old poet who started at the age of 9, Carolyn Forche also loves translating the work of others into English.

"Translating is a labor of love," Forche said by phone from her home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where she teaches creative writing at Skidmore College.

Forche has always been very interested in languages and finds both poetry and its translation to be a compelling experience. "The translation of poetry led me to every other good thing in my life. You almost become that poet while you are translating. To work, the poem in Spanish must also be a good poem in English."

She also learned a great deal about the culture of Latin America.

Forche recognized that Americans are what she calls a monolingual country. "We wouldn't be able to read the Bible or Dante or many other important works unless they were translated."

She knows from her work with other translators that it must be a collaborative work, and that translators should be given credit for their work.

Forche said that when she went to college at Michigan State University, there were no creative-writing majors. "I changed my major five times. And finally, in graduate school at Bowling Green State University, I took a Master of Fine Arts degree. A thesis I wrote later won the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest, and Stanley Kunitz launched me as a poet."

Forche is still concerned that a poet needs the right connection to be published. She was only 26 when her first book, "Gathering the Tribes" (1976), was published. She says she got lucky.

The two "founding poets" — Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman — probably influenced her the most as a young poet. "One was reclusive and the other was the bard of a new America. He was writing a nation into being. No American poet has surpassed either of them."

Forche's second book, "The Country Between Us" (1982), caused her to become known as a political poet, because "it had seven poems written about my experiences in El Salvador. To be political, to me, is to go to a lot of meetings, and I had never done that, and I still don't. I don't lobby.

"If anyone is called a political poet in America, it is usually an insult. I wasn't writing for or against a cause, but the poems didn't make the government of El Salvador look very good."

After that, she was invited to be on several panel discussions about poetry and politics. She said she was taken aback, and the "Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness" (1993) anthology, which she edited, was her response. She followed that with "The Angel of History" (1994).

Neither was political.