Quotes by Andre Naffis-Sahely - Page 1

I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Enough
Memories
My Own
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Fear knows no borders, and the terminology of hate has seeped into every aspect of life.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Aspects Of Life
Borders
Hate
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When it comes to the challenges of the actual process, I soldier on as best I can, on my own.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Challenges
Process
Soldier
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Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Middle
Pulse
Real
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As Trevor Noah recently quipped, the US appears ready to crown its first African dictator: Donald Trump.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Crowns
Dictator
Firsts
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I've heard of translators collaborating closely with their authors, sometimes even living with them for a while, but that's not me.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Heard
Sometimes
Translators
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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.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Lifetime
Political
Shy
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The average political poem - especially the kind that wears this label all too proudly - is both dull and full of brow-beating triteness.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Average
Labels
Political
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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.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Tea
Way
Writing
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Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Pay
Poet
Want
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I can't quite see the point of poems like "Wittgenstein Goes for a Walk with A Hawk in Sherwood Forest." I know they're trying to be clever, but they're not.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Clever
Hawks
Trying
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The West is anxious about becoming another Africa, and it has dug deep moats in the hopes of preventing that, but it's too late: it has already become another Africa.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Moats
Too Late
West
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I'm of the opinion that poetry is always political, and cannot help but be so, regardless of the poet's intent, given that refusing to deal in politics is in itself a political act.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Helping
Opinion
Political
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That boom town [Abu Dhabi] proved to be the reef against which my family crashed, the story of many who seek the promised land, and my poetry is a versification of that personal history. History is all I have.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Land
Stories
Towns
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Translators who choose to work on canonized writers can usually lean on an extensive critical apparatus around either the author or the book in question, especially in the case of writers like [Honore] Balzac and [Emil] Zola.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Book
Cases
Zola
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Take Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic, where xenophobic demagogues have been allowed to turn the law-abiding workers who prop up their economies into barbaric freeloaders, all simply to further their nefarious ends.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Abiding
Law
Sides
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To be a political poet means simply to be a poet, and any poet worth their salt will be a political animal in their own peculiar way - they have no choice: politics is one of the many fragments we thread into the tapestry of the poem.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Animal
Choices
Mean
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As the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has presciently pointed out, neoliberal corporate globalism threatens to exploit that advantage like never before, and it seems set to turn vast swathes of humanity into "the Negros of a new racism."
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Humanity
Philosopher
Racism
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Meanwhile, the disgruntled "natives" of the West remain empty-handed and keep baying for blood, stuck on the caboose of the train, like Bob Dylan used to sing. Despair will always be a merchandize so long as we refuse to confront these lies head-on.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Blood
Long
Lying
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I came to poetry at fourteen, in the middle of a booming oil-rush town in southern Arabia without a single public library: Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. All the wealth in the world and not a single intelligent idea as to how to employ it.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Ideas
Intelligent
Oil
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The real question should be: what makes a good political poem? The possible answers to that question are both obvious and yet still a little too subjective for anyone to ever fully agree on. What do I most wish to see in a political poet? Sublimated rebellion.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Political
Real
Wish
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Whenever poetry and politics are mentioned in the same breath, we tend to miss the point entirely - as I often have - and we ask ourselves whether poetry and politics even belong together, because they're often so poorly married that we think of them as oil and water.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Missing
Oil And Water
Thinking
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[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."
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Government
Teacher
School
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Dealing with politically-engaged writers of color like Abdellatif Laâbi and Rashid Boudjedra - who ran away from school aged sixteen to fight against the French in the Algerian war - first requires convincing an editor to take a chance on them, which very few like to do these days.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
War
Fighting
School
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Abdellatif [Laâbi] was wildly popular with his students and it wasn't difficult to see why: like them, he knew that average Moroccans were hungry, jobless and desperate. They also knew they were ruled by a paranoid king who was more comfortable with Parisian financiers than his own subjects.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Kings
Average
Students
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I'm mostly surprised by the fact he's still alive; given that people have been trying to silence him for almost fifty years, he really shouldn't be. Aged thirty, Abdellatif [Laâbi's ] was kidnapped from his home in Rabat by plainclothes policemen, bundled into the back of an unmarked car, driven to a dingy gaol, and tortured for days on end.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Home
People
Years
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Some of my colleagues are surprised by how little personal interaction I've had with "my" authors, but I don't translate to go fishing for friends. Part of me suspects that they wouldn't like me, or that I wouldn't like them, which would inevitably get in the way of the mission. None of the theory built around translation matters to me anyway: much of the process, I find, is intuitive.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Fishing
Littles
Matter
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Regardless of whether the authors I've translated have been "dead and canonized," or "living and established," or even simply "emerging," I must put myself to the same, old test: "can I do their texts justice?" I've translated twenty-one books, and except for three commissions, I "hand-picked" all my authors on the basis of whether my own peculiar idiosyncrasies would complement their own.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Book
Hands
Justice
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In a sense, I never got over Robert Lowell's History. A flawed, infinitely brilliant project I never tire of going back to. It's a modern Inferno, where Lowell plays both Dante and Virgil, guiding us through dozens of illuminating, bitter episodes from human history, all the while managing to hold a mirror to our confused hominid face as it squints at eternity and fails to grasp any of it.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Confused
Mirrors
Play
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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.
Andre Naffis-Sahely / Poet
Art
Organization
Risk
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