Take Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic, where xenophobic demagogues have been allowed to turn the law-abiding workers who prop up their economies into barbaric freeloaders, all simply to further their nefarious ends.

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.

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.

As the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has presciently pointed out, neoliberal corporate globalism threatens to exploit that advantage like never before, and it seems set to turn vast swathes of humanity into "the Negros of a new racism."

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.

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

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.