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.

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.

Generally risk-averse, specialist translation imprints have also hollowed out a fairly comfortable niche for themselves: they get ninety percent of the profits for ten percent of the work, often largely funding their operations - and their salaries - through grants that they don't even apply for. If it wasn't for publicly-funded arts bodies and organizations such as PEN, I wouldn't have been able to work on either [Abdellatif] Laâbi or [ Rashid ] Boudjedra.

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

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.

[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."

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.