English is a forgiving language. It's not like Classical Arabic and it's not like French. You can speak broken English and be expressive and no one will hold it against you.

It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know.

You always have regime-friendly poets like Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, whose career basically spans the twentieth century. He's an anti-imperialist, friendly with the Communists, and somehow survives all that and is shuttling between Baghdad and Damascus depending on which way the winds are blowing with the Baathists and their competition. But he's not a regime stooge, he's independent.

The more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power. There's no core to what Michel Aflaq has to say that results in this. That was a key to looking at Michel Aflaq as a sideshow. He's the intellectual father of an ideology that no one probably ever believed in. At that point I began to appreciate him in a funny way.

Translation is harder, believe it or not. You do have to come up with a story, and actually I'm mystified by that process. I don't exactly know how the story just comes, but it does. But in writing a story that you're inventing, versus writing a story that somebody else has made up - there's a world of difference. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing.

In trying to imagine this world, I kept coming back to Michel Aflaq. He's a Christian Arab, a Syrian, who ends up finding his home in Iraq and is buried there - I was stunned to see his tomb is right smack down in the Green Zone.

There were illegal poets like Muzaffar al-Nawab, this is the thing - Muzaffar was widely known and he didn't really have books. He would deliver these readings on cassette tape. Go on YouTube and listen to him. He's like a preacher. He's a really interesting figure in modern Iraqi life.