Challenges Quote by Andre Naffis-Sahely

Translators who choose to work on canonized writers can usually lean on an extensive critical apparatus around either the author or the book in…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

The real question should be: what makes a good political poem? The possible answers to that question are both obvious and yet still a…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

As the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has presciently pointed out, neoliberal corporate globalism threatens to exploit that advantage like never before, and it seems…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

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

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,…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

Whenever poetry and politics are mentioned in the same breath, we tend to miss the point entirely - as I often have - and…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

That boom town [Abu Dhabi] proved to be the reef against which my family crashed, the story of many who seek the promised land,…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

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…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

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,…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely