Some of my colleagues are surprised by how little personal interaction I've had with "my" authors, but I don't translate to go fishing for friends. Part of me suspects that they wouldn't like me, or that I wouldn't like them, which would inevitably get in the way of the mission. None of the theory built around translation matters to me anyway: much of the process, I find, is intuitive.

I've heard of translators collaborating closely with their authors, sometimes even living with them for a while, but that's not me.

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

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

One cannot simply decide to write apolitical poetry, in the way one decides to drink lemonade instead of tea, it's far more subliminal than that.

The West is anxious about becoming another Africa, and it has dug deep moats in the hopes of preventing that, but it's too late: it has already become another Africa.

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.