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.

[Abdellatif Laâbi] was a poet and worked as a high school teacher; and although he hadn't broken any laws, the Moroccan government was determined to "gag" him - I use the term specifically since one of my favorite sequences of his is entitled "The Poem Beneath The Gag."

I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.

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

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

I'm mostly surprised by the fact he's still alive; given that people have been trying to silence him for almost fifty years, he really shouldn't be. Aged thirty, Abdellatif [Laâbi's ] was kidnapped from his home in Rabat by plainclothes policemen, bundled into the back of an unmarked car, driven to a dingy gaol, and tortured for days on end.

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.