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

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.

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.

I can't quite see the point of poems like "Wittgenstein Goes for a Walk with A Hawk in Sherwood Forest." I know they're trying to be clever, but they're not.

Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy away from it.

Translators who choose to work on canonized writers can usually lean on an extensive critical apparatus around either the author or the book in question, especially in the case of writers like [Honore] Balzac and [Emil] Zola.

To be a political poet means simply to be a poet, and any poet worth their salt will be a political animal in their own peculiar way - they have no choice: politics is one of the many fragments we thread into the tapestry of the poem.