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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.

  Elliott Colla

  Song, People, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• There were illegal poets like Muzaffar al-Nawab, this is the thing - Muzaffar was widely known and he didn't really have books. He would deliver these readings on cassette tape. Go on YouTube and listen to him. He's like a preacher. He's a really interesting figure in modern Iraqi life.

  Elliott Colla

  Book, Reading, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The truly astounding thing is the Baathist regime supports poetry like nobody else, probably in the world.

  Elliott Colla

  Support, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• So you have in Iraq some people falling prey to the system, some people managing to negotiate independence, and other people becoming outlaws, and being imprisoned and dying. You have all sorts. I don't know any other society where poetry has such a place.

  Elliott Colla

  Fall, People, Independence

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know. An American author does not need to know a word of Arabic to write a book like the one I wrote.

  Elliott Colla

  Book, Writing, People

  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

• The Baathist state did two things extremely well. One was create information-gathering intelligence networks and a filing system. There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state. The second one is the promotion of literature and poetry, and the arts generally. So this is a state that's producing mass police archives - surveillance - and poetry. And in fact a lot of the archives are about what poets are writing or what they should be writing.

  Elliott Colla

  Art, Writing, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Style, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

  Elliott Colla

  Moving, Successful, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The stories that confirm that bigger story are brought in and easily digested. But there's another set of stories that are always there, which do not confirm, but which complicate and contradict what we think we already know. And I'm always attracted to that. There doesn't seem to be much of a market for it. 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, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• In the Green Zone in Iraq you have your radio, you have your food, you have your own electricity, your own toilets. Everything is a sealed American reality overlaid on top of an infrastructure that is crumbling.

  Elliott Colla

  Reality, Electricity, Zone

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Culture is invited to the table usually only as raw material that needs no analysis.

  Elliott Colla

  Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, how power is maintained, how it circulates, how relationships are formed, how institutions are built, how they fall. Every discipline would answer those questions in different ways.

  Elliott Colla

  Fall, Discipline, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently Americans thought the names of places were just too complicated so they got decent maps of Baghdad and just renamed everything with familiar names. This neighborhood would be Hollywood, that neighborhood would be Manhattan, and that one's Madison, you're going to drive down Oak and take a left on Main Street.

  Elliott Colla

  Moving, Reality, Complicated

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Certain readers will read my book not because they are interested in Iraq, but because they read crime fiction. I did want to get beyond just speaking to other Middle East scholars, so I'm happy about that. But this was, nonetheless, a novel I wish I got to read in Arabic and translate.

  Elliott Colla

  Book, Wish, Crime

  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

• 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

• 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

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin