Andre Naffis-Sahely: I came to poetry at fourteen, in the middle of a...

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

home people years

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

Andre Naffis-Sahely

pulse middle real

Fear knows no borders, and the terminology of hate has seeped into every aspect of life.

Andre Naffis-Sahely

aspects-of-life borders hate

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

abiding law sides

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

political real wish

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

hawks clever trying

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

Andre Naffis-Sahely

my-own enough memories

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

towns land stories

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

confused mirrors play

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

translators heard sometimes

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

fishing matter littles

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

justice book hands

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

shy political lifetime

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

labels political average

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

choices animal mean

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

writing tea way

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

oil-and-water missing thinking

When it comes to the challenges of the actual process, I soldier on as best I can, on my own.

Andre Naffis-Sahely

soldier process challenges

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

opinion political helping

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 want pay

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.