I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

          of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

          is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

                     -Ilya Kaminsky

INTERVIEWER

Alexandra, you move comfortably as a writer between the US and El Salvador to the point where you’ve coined the term “double agent” for yourself. How was it that your family moved to the US from El Salvador, and later you returned as a young adult?

ALEXANDRA LYTTON REGALADO

When my mom saw a dead body hanging off a tree limb along a very transited road, the Civil War was heating up, my parents decided it was time to move to the US. Luckily, we were able to leave by airplane, a very, very different immigration story to many who’ve had to cross through different, more complicated means. I spent my childhood in Miami, which is also a sort of Latin American extension, you know, most of my friends were Latinas.

When I met my husband and he asked me to marry him, he had just moved back to El Salvador, so we both had very similar lives in that he grew up in the US, in California. I was so in love I would have followed him to China, Africa, anywhere at that point.

As far as being a double agent, I think the two languages were always present in my home life. My mom, whose parents are both Salvadoran, spoke to us in Spanish, but we often answered in English. My father’s dad was American. His mother was Salvadoran, but he grew up in the US, like me. So, I feel there’s a “half-ness” to my languages. Having lived in both places, I feel an essence you cannot just perceive, it is like you’re totally submerged in each place, like I have an “in” in both places, a behind the stage feeling of the way these worlds work. And more specifically, I’m talking about the literary world, where I move in.

INTERVIEWER

I feel those two distinct world cultures are very much embodied in Matria and Relinquenda. Will you provide a snippet of those different, yet connected spaces?

REGALADO

In El Salvador, for my book Matria, I was working on a parallel project taking photographs from the window of my car. It’s a bulletproof car (vestiges of the Civil War) and I was being driven by a driver, so there is yet another layer of privilege, and a layer of observation—knowing that as I’m looking at all those things, I’m very much enclosed in this kind of circle of protection.

I saw on this corner I pass every day, a young girl practicing her majorette dance in an improvised costume. On the other side of the street there was also a man behind a chain link fence watching her. So, it became very evident to me: all of these circles of desire, the act of observation and one being observed. It was my intention to photograph her at that moment, but I couldn’t access my phone at that moment. And so, the idea for me was this: I’m going to try to replicate that experience of layered observation.

The poems in Matria all have Spanish language titles, and the idea was that they were going to be formatted kind of like a lotería, not like that traditional Mexican lotería, but in my reinvention of a Salvadoran feminine lotería.

INTERVIEWER

Years after Matria, you wrote Relinquenda in Miami, from your childhood home?

REGALADO

Yes, the instance in the “Relinquenda” title poem actually did happen to me when I was living with my mom and my grandmother during the COVID lockdown.  Every morning, I would go for a walk and the snake was there sunning itself on the paving stones and I knew that the snake and I were going to have an encounter. One day I accidentally left the door open, and when I returned from the walk the snake was inside of the terraza and I had to find a way to get it out.

There was something being communicated to me, in that I invited that danger, that threat.  A lot of Relinquenda focuses on the idea of pain and fear. I think the snake was the embodiment of that anxiety and the possibility of future pain.

The challenge is letting go of those things, right? Like wanting to cut the snake in half with a machete, or like swishing it out of the room with the broom, you know, but also realizing that the origin and source and host of all that encounter is myself. The snake, with its tail in its mouth is me, you know.

INTERVIEWER

Two related questions, if I may delve into any contrast between El Salvador and the US. Does community help writers more in one place, than in the other? Is it more challenging to find identity when Salvadoran-Americans are a fraction of the US Latinx diaspora?

REGALADO

When I first started going to AWP about 20 years ago there was not really an easy opportunity to find Central American writers. And it wasn’t until the Latin American caucus at AWP was formed that we were able to understand a little bit more about the Latinx makeup of our writers. There is a lot of Central America present in the diasporan writing world, but it’s not always 100% Salvadoran. I mean, who is 100% in this world anyway?

INTERVIEWER

Is there a similarity in the aesthetics of the Spanish language writing among Latin Americans, or do they differ markedly?

REGALADO

When I first started Kalina, our publishing company with Lucía de Sola, the aesthetic in El Sal leaned towards modern poetry that focused on surreal images. No one wrote anything specifically personal, with a few exceptions. The group of writers we publish in Kalina, a lot of them are women and their writing taps into the feminist vein, in understanding what it’s like to be a daughter, sister, mother, wife.

US-born Salvis today are very much interested in what happened during the Civil War— they’re investigating their own origin story because they wouldn’t have grown up in the US if the war hadn’t occurred, so it’s kind of a hinging point, whereas I find Salvadoran writers producing work now [in El Salvador] are talking about other issues or focus on existential questions more related to the post war. A lot of people have a difficult time talking about what’s going on today and with due reason.

We’re into two plus years in a state martial law, with limited constitutional rights, our words are monitored. So, it’s difficult to delve into the situation of El Salvador today. Contemporary Salvadoran writers and artists struggle with our current restricted freedom of expression. And you know there is a true danger of being exiled. Jorge Galán has been exiled already once in the past for his novel Noviembre. You don’t want to be receiving death threats. You know, it’s a serious consideration.

INTERVIEWER

I am impressed with the title and intriguing lyrics in your latest poem published this month in Poetry magazine, “Negative Capability in El Salvador.” The poem creates symbolic figures as in the line “I cut my finger carving an angel and printed the moon’s face with my blood.” Are you writing about the repression that is going on “with a slant”?

REGALADO

I am very much concerned about power systems and how they prey on our anxiety about the unknown. My new poems focus on religion, yes, but also any kind of authority that instructs us to stay quiet and trust that things will be Ok if we just have some faith. I thought of Keat’s concept of Negative Capability and how that also echoes Rilke’s advice to the young poet to try to “love the questions” and how that rubs against our need to know everything now, all at once. I’ve written a lot of poems where Jesus, El Salvador del Mundo, is at the center and I question our veneration of suffering.

That’s the good thing about poetic imagery, as well as fiction (especially speculative) and visual arts where symbolism stands in for what you cannot come out and say. And if you have the eye for it, you’re able to make those parallels.

INTERVIEWER

Another even more recent milestone is your folio essay, just published (Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology) on the poetry of seven contemporary Salvadorans, in which you create the metonymy of a broken clock for the historical times of El Salvador. Can you describe this further?

REGALADO 

Yes, the essay focuses on the Salvadoran poets featured in the anthology and the difficulty we face with staying in the moment. For many Salvadorans, our sense of time has been fractured by history. We live inside a loop of anxiety and nostalgia—wanting to be in two places at once. Staying in the moment implies a stability that many of us, shaped by displacement and survival, have not experienced. While resilience defines us, survival often traps us in cycles of fight, flight, or feigning. It becomes difficult to connect with the present, construct a clear past, or imagine a future—and therefore, to heal. In many of the Salvadoran poems included in the anthology, pain often becomes the unlikely doorway to presence.

INTERVIEWER

Returning to your roots in both the US and El Salvador, how do the two languages frame or influence your writing process?

REGALADO

When I first moved back and having studied American and British literature, I had to learn a whole new canon. I can’t say that Spanish was a language I felt entirely comfortable in to enter complicated conversations. But now it’s almost 25 years I’ve been back in El Sal and my Spanish is much more solid.

INTERVIEWER

And now you are author, editor and promoter of a diverse platform of Salvadoran writers creating in Spanish. You’ve published several translations or bilingual editions in Kalina, including your own, bilingual chapbook, Piedra (2022). What are the challenges and delights of translating the works of others in comparison to your own? 

REGALADO

I do not have a handle on Spanish the way that I have a handle on English. I learned grammar and all the writing rules in English! Though I’ve worked as an editor now for 18 plus years, I still feel it’s necessary to have a mother-tongue, Spanish-language poet review my work. Usually, I’ll extend the same favor to the poet and work on an English translation of one of their poems.

I’ve been very lucky in that I have access to the poets I’ve translated–especially when it comes to deciding certain word choices. Since we’re friends, I can go back and forth in the exchange as I work on the final draft.

For instance, in one of the last lines of Jorge Galan’s poem he’s describing these women picking coffee and they’re sort of like reaching over a coffee bush. I was able to ask: Can you describe what that looks like because I was having a difficult time confirming what that verb might imply: arching, merging, disappearing, avoiding? Lots of gradations in the way someone can lean.

Translating is the closest, most personal reading. I liken it to trying on someone’s clothes, figuring out why they made the decision to use that word or why they broke the line there. It’s also something that I like to do between my personal writing projects because it injects energy into my work, making me think twice. Like, what would Jorge do in this instance, remembering a particular way a poem began or ended and trying out those moves.

I take a different aesthetic, especially when I translate my own work, because translating has been one of the most useful editing tools I’ve discovered. You can hear the BS when it doesn’t ring true. You can see where things have gone flat or where you’re repeating or where a verb could be stronger.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve participated in many ways with Poetry International. What words do you have for our staff and readers?

REGALADO

International writing in translation has always been central to my inspiration. Even before I began to read poetry, my mother used to take us to see foreign films. And she kind of made us into these precocious kids. She would say, Oh, no worries, sex, drugs, violence and other disturbing stuff… it’s an art film. And not really understanding, I learned how to be fine with feeling uncomfortable as I try to follow something more lyrical or imagistic… Not the easy plot or 1-2-3 sequential story lines that a traditional Hollywood film would have.

My mom was an amateur painter and an art dealer. Her artist friends visited the house often, and we were always surrounded by beautiful art on our walls. And so those experiences of being open to learning about other cultures and looking at art and asking questions, obviously not just for its aesthetic, but wondering about the impulse to create, that also gave me a hand in being able to say, today I feel like embroidering, and tomorrow I’m going to try out pottery or sculpture or whatever, you know, always entering something new with the willingness to confront failure, but always experimenting.

And so, it’s very meaningful to find in the pages of Poetry International other perspectives and ways of life, for example, like I have here (I’m gonna flip my computer around, sorry my office is kind of messy) but one of the artworks hanging on my wall is a broadside of Ilya Kaminsky’s “Authors’ Prayer” that’s hanging on the wall right across my desk. There’s an impulse to be open to signals the way I begin my writing process. What darkness must I praise? I love the aesthetic of international writers, their fresh images and unexpected syntax.

It’s what opened me to translation—wanting to understand other minds; being in the presence of another person’s creation. I love to research and experiment—it’s super liberating. Because there’s not just one way to do it right, translating and reading others opens a labyrinth of possibility. So, I’m very grateful to the different venues that open us to a world perspective, you know, not just North American writing.

INTERVIEWER

Thank you so much for sharing your insights as an artist and promoter of other emerging or unread Spanish language writers.

REGALADO

Really. Thank you so much for your time. It means so much. You know, when someone spends time with your work, and they communicate the feeling that you’re not writing in a void. That connection is what’s most important.