Elliott Colla famous quotes

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

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

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

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

#People #Humanity #Doe

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Culture

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

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

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

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

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

#Support #World

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

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

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

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

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

#Black And White #Division #Noir

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

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

#Horse #Writing #Two

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

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

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

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

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

There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state.
-- Elliott Colla

#People #Achievement #Police

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

In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.
-- Elliott Colla

#Beautiful #Couple #Broken

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

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

Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so ***** 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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