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Elliott Colla Biography

Elliott Colla is an American scholar of the Middle East, specializing in Arabic literature and culture. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.

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Elliott Colla Quotes

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.

Great Work, Program, Realized, Sort, Write, Writing

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

Great Poetry, Horrible, Michel, Politics, Utopian

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

People, Achievement, Police, Actually, State

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.

Fields, Gauge, Humanity, Playwrights, Power, Salary

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.

Art, Book, Corresponding, Digest, Style, Theme

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.

Away, Moving, Poetry, Strange, Successful, Thinking

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.

Experimental, Kind, Kinds, People, Recitation, Song

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.

Arabic, Doing You, Language, Trying, Two, Version

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.

Living, Novel, Program, Thinking, Translation, Unit

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

Corruption, Ideas, Iraq, Nothing, Structures

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.

Electricity, Iraq, Reality, Toilets, Zone

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.

Different, Discipline, Fall, Institutions, Questions

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.

Book, Certain, Crime, Speaking, Wish

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.

Art, Mass, People, Police, Producing, Writing

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.

Americans, Complicated, Down, Moving, Reality, Street

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.

Arab, Cold, Occupation, War

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

Culture, Invited, Raw, Table, Usually

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.

Arabic, Book, Humanity, Imagine, People, Writing

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

Astounding, Probably, Support, Supports, Thing, World

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.

Crafts, Fiction, Write, Writers, Writing

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Elliott Colla Biography

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