“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.”
![“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.” quote by Andre Naffis-Sahely](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/dae/andre-naffis-sahely-20813_balzac_translators-who-choose-to-work-on-canoni_67754.jpg)
![“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.” quote by Andre Naffis-Sahely](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/b48/andre-naffis-sahely-20813_family_that-boom-town-abu-dhabi-proved-to-be-th_623350.jpg)
![“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.” quote by Andre Naffis-Sahely](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/b63/andre-naffis-sahely-20813_average_abdellatif-la-bi-was-wildly-popular-with_1000659.jpg)
