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.

I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.

Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know. An American author does not need to know a word of Arabic to write a book like the one I wrote.

Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.