Abdellatif [Laâbi] was wildly popular with his students and it wasn't difficult to see why: like them, he knew that average Moroccans were hungry, jobless and desperate. They also knew they were ruled by a paranoid king who was more comfortable with Parisian financiers than his own subjects.

Abdellatif [Laâbi] was wildly popular with his students and it wasn't difficult to see why: like them, he knew that average Moroccans were hungry, jobless and desperate. They also knew they were ruled by a paranoid king who was more comfortable with Parisian financiers than his own subjects.

As Trevor Noah recently quipped, the US appears ready to crown its first African dictator: Donald Trump.

In a sense, I never got over Robert Lowell's History. A flawed, infinitely brilliant project I never tire of going back to. It's a modern Inferno, where Lowell plays both Dante and Virgil, guiding us through dozens of illuminating, bitter episodes from human history, all the while managing to hold a mirror to our confused hominid face as it squints at eternity and fails to grasp any of it.

I'm of the opinion that poetry is always political, and cannot help but be so, regardless of the poet's intent, given that refusing to deal in politics is in itself a political act.

Fear knows no borders, and the terminology of hate has seeped into every aspect of life.

Generally risk-averse, specialist translation imprints have also hollowed out a fairly comfortable niche for themselves: they get ninety percent of the profits for ten percent of the work, often largely funding their operations - and their salaries - through grants that they don't even apply for. If it wasn't for publicly-funded arts bodies and organizations such as PEN, I wouldn't have been able to work on either [Abdellatif] Laâbi or [ Rashid ] Boudjedra.