The truly astounding thing is the Baathist regime supports poetry like nobody else, probably in the world.

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's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state.

The truly astounding thing is the Baathist regime supports poetry like nobody else, probably in the world.

In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.

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.

I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction. In conversations with him I realized that translations have been my MFA program. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English. That's how I've figured it out.