I’ve forgotten to ask the Nicaraguans I’ve met about the weight poetry holds for them in their lives.

Apparently, in Nicaragua, everybody - the politician, the farmer, the revolutionary - “is a poet until they are proven otherwise”… so said Daniel Ortega in the mid-1980s to Salman Rushdie when the author visited his country (The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey).

But if it is true, I would have liked to get under the skin of some of the country’s poets. Yet at the same time, as one of Nicaragua’s modern poets (I can’t now remember his name) said, translation equals assassination. And I wholly agree. No matter how acclaimed a work is, I would rather not read it if I can’t read it in its original language.

However, I came across a poem by female poet and revolutionary Giocondo Belli (read an interview), a poem which seems to be the most ubiquitously translated:

Rivers run through me
mountains bear into my body
and the geography of this country
begins forming in me
turning me into lakes, chasms, ravines,
earth for sowing love
opening like a furrow
filling me with a longing to live
to set it free, beautiful
full of smiles…
i want to explode with love

Discounting my (probably uneducated) disdain for translated works, this translated poem works for me. Nothing describes the landscape of Nicaragua so well, its burgeoning quality.