Whenever poetry and politics are mentioned in the same breath, we tend to miss the point entirely - as I often have - and we ask ourselves whether poetry and politics even belong together, because they're often so poorly married that we think of them as oil and water.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, the disgruntled "natives" of the West remain empty-handed and keep baying for blood, stuck on the caboose of the train, like Bob Dylan used to sing. Despair will always be a merchandize so long as we refuse to confront these lies head-on.

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.

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

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