Elliott Colla Quotes

Quotes about:

• Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference. In a way, if someone says this didn't feel exactly right, I don't care. But that is not okay to do in academia - it's not about feeling. You want to establish a pretty solid case. So did this allow me to express things differently? Absolutely. Another thing I've been thinking about as an academic: our writing style is expository, and in fiction, withholding information matters quite a bit. Withholding things in academia - there's no place for that!

  Elliott Colla

  Writing, Thinking, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elliott Colla

  Writing, Differences, Fiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.

  Elliott Colla

  Wish, Fiction, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.

  Elliott Colla

  Two, Trying, Doing You

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know.

  Elliott Colla

  People, Humanity, Doe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• English is a forgiving language. It's not like Classical Arabic and it's not like French. You can speak broken English and be expressive and no one will hold it against you.

  Elliott Colla

  Broken, Forgiving, Language

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• You always have regime-friendly poets like Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, whose career basically spans the twentieth century. He's an anti-imperialist, friendly with the Communists, and somehow survives all that and is shuttling between Baghdad and Damascus depending on which way the winds are blowing with the Baathists and their competition. But he's not a regime stooge, he's independent.

  Elliott Colla

  Independent, Competition, Friendly

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elliott Colla

  Iraq, Looks, Stories

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.

  Elliott Colla

  Art, Book, Style

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elliott Colla

  Believe, Writing, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction. In conversations with him I realized that translations have been my MFA program. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English. That's how I've figured it out.

  Elliott Colla

  Writing, Program, Great Work

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• With Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited, make the unit of the chapters small so that you can finish one a day, at least in the first draft. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Program, Novel

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell you something. There are no Baathists, no one believes this stuff, this is stuff you read in school because it's assigned to you. Maybe someone believed it, but no one really believes it." And I thought that was really interesting to hear, because the ideology of Baathism was presented so often to Americans as the core of what's wrong.

  Elliott Colla

  Believe, Book, Reading

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power. There's no core to what Michel Aflaq has to say that results in this. That was a key to looking at Michel Aflaq as a sideshow. He's the intellectual father of an ideology that no one probably ever believed in. At that point I began to appreciate him in a funny way.

  Elliott Colla

  Father, Appreciate, Intellectual

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

  Elliott Colla

  Horrible, Great Poetry, Utopian

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are certainly times in history where power associates itself closely with fields that we would call the humanities, like rulers surrounding themselves with philosophers and poets, or playwrights. We do not live in that moment, and the best way to gauge the proximity of an academic field to power is by salary.

  Elliott Colla

  Humanity, Salary, Gauges

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Bookstores, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

  Elliott Colla

  Black And White, Division, Noir

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Just as certain Cold War binaries were collapsing, new binaries of Sunni versus Shia or Arab versus Kurd were being created by the new occupation force. It's the corruption of that moment that I am really interested in.

  Elliott Colla

  War, Occupation, Cold

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.

  Elliott Colla

  Horse, Writing, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.

  Elliott Colla

  Writing, Fiction, Crafts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft.

  Elliott Colla

  Firsts, Grows

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Gone, Program

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• In trying to imagine this world, I kept coming back to Michel Aflaq. He's a Christian Arab, a Syrian, who ends up finding his home in Iraq and is buried there - I was stunned to see his tomb is right smack down in the Green Zone.

  Elliott Colla

  Christian, Home, Iraq

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power.

  Elliott Colla

  Ideas, Iraq, Corruption

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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