Andre Naffis-Sahely Quotes

• 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.

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Intelligent, Ideas, Oil

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Mean, Animal, Choices

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Real, Pulse, Middle

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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, Years, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Hate, Borders, Aspects Of Life

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Law, Abiding, Sides

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Clever, Trying, Hawks

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Book, Zola, Cases

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Dealing with politically-engaged writers of color like Abdellatif Laâbi and Rashid Boudjedra - who ran away from school aged sixteen to fight against the French in the Algerian war - first requires convincing an editor to take a chance on them, which very few like to do these days.

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  War, School, Fighting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Generally risk-averse, specialist translation imprints have also hollowed out a fairly comfortable niche for themselves: they get ninety percent of the profits for ten percent of the work, often largely funding their operations - and their salaries - through grants that they don't even apply for. If it wasn't for publicly-funded arts bodies and organizations such as PEN, I wouldn't have been able to work on either [Abdellatif] Laâbi or [ Rashid ] Boudjedra.

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Art, Organization, Risk

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Challenges, Soldier, Process

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Memories, Enough, My Own

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Land, Stories, Towns

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Real, Political, Wish

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Kings, Average, Students

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Meanwhile, the disgruntled "natives" of the West remain empty-handed and keep baying for blood, stuck on the caboose of the train, like Bob Dylan used to sing. Despair will always be a merchandize so long as we refuse to confront these lies head-on.

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Lying, Blood, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• As the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has presciently pointed out, neoliberal corporate globalism threatens to exploit that advantage like never before, and it seems set to turn vast swathes of humanity into "the Negros of a new racism."

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Racism, Humanity, Philosopher

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The West is anxious about becoming another Africa, and it has dug deep moats in the hopes of preventing that, but it's too late: it has already become another Africa.

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Moats, Too Late, West

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Thinking, Oil And Water, Missing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• [Abdellatif Laâbi] was a poet and worked as a high school teacher; and although he hadn't broken any laws, the Moroccan government was determined to "gag" him - I use the term specifically since one of my favorite sequences of his is entitled "The Poem Beneath The Gag."

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Teacher, School, Government

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Average, Political, Labels

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Political, Shy, Lifetime

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Book, Hands, Justice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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