Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.

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

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.

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

The average political poem - especially the kind that wears this label all too proudly - is both dull and full of brow-beating triteness.

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.

Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.