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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Dealing with politically-engaged writers of color like Abdellatif Laâbi and Rashid Boudjedra - who ran away from school aged sixteen to fight against the French in the Algerian war - first requires convincing an editor to take a chance on them, which very few like to do these days.