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.

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.

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

[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."

When it comes to the challenges of the actual process, I soldier on as best I can, on my own.

One cannot simply decide to write apolitical poetry, in the way one decides to drink lemonade instead of tea, it's far more subliminal than that.

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