There was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently Americans thought the names of places were just too complicated so they got decent maps of Baghdad and just renamed everything with familiar names. This neighborhood would be Hollywood, that neighborhood would be Manhattan, and that one's Madison, you're going to drive down Oak and take a left on Main Street.

The Baathist state did two things extremely well. One was create information-gathering intelligence networks and a filing system. There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state. The second one is the promotion of literature and poetry, and the arts generally. So this is a state that's producing mass police archives - surveillance - and poetry. And in fact a lot of the archives are about what poets are writing or what they should be writing.

In the Green Zone in Iraq you have your radio, you have your food, you have your own electricity, your own toilets. Everything is a sealed American reality overlaid on top of an infrastructure that is crumbling.

Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

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.

Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.

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.