SOURCE: Cardenal, Ernesto, and Margaret Randall. “Talking with Ernesto Cardenal.” Fiction International 16, no. 2 (summer/fall 1986): 47–60.

In the following interview, Cardenal discusses his literary influences, his religious conversion, and his views on Nicaraguan politics.

Ernesto Cardenal has become a legend in his lifetime. More important, he has been a prophet in his land: the first Nicaraguan priest to join the struggle of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), back in the late sixties.

The second son of a wealthy family in the conservative city of Granada, he took part in an attempt to overthrow Somoza García, in 1954. A poet, he was more deeply influenced by Ezra Pound than by his native Darío, yet his verse is both profoundly Nicaraguan and intensely visionary, even to its specifics.

A man in need of the flesh as well as the spirit, he nonetheless responded to a clear call to the...