Elliott Colla Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Elliott Colla

  Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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