André Naffis-Sahely’s (andrenaffis.com) first collection of poetry is The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017). His translations from French and Italian include works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Alessandro Spina, Rashid Boudjedra, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Beyond the Barbed Wire (Carcanet, 2016), his translation of the selected poems of Abdellatif Laâbi, received a Writers in Translation award from English PEN. His essay on Tangiers, “You’ll Never Leave: Seeking Salvation on the Shores of Morocco,” appears in the Winter 2019 issue of WLT.
Hexham, UK. Bloodaxe Books. 2022. 80 pages.
THE TITLE OF André Naffis-Sahely’s second volume of poetry, High Desert, suggests a collection celebrating a specific place, an e...
Tour guide at the Queen Mine in Bisbee / Photo by Scott Durgan / Flickr
Last summer, I spent July and part of August in a straw-bale house in Cochise County, less than half an hour north of Bi...
As 2018 drew to an end, my thoughts increasingly turned to the Eritrean writer Ribka Sibhatu, the first author I decided to work on when I took up literary translation professionally in 2010. Sibhatu...
Photo: Maged/Flickr
Throughout its 2,500-year history, irrespective of whether it was a Carthaginian colony, a Roman provincial capital, a Portuguese colony, an English naval outpost, or a Moro...
Jeffers’s Tor House in Carmel / Photo by L. A. Momboisse
The Venice of my birth, a far cry from Casanova’s Serene Republic, whose spectre tourists chase at the tune of hundreds of euros a day, had a...
Sarah Maguire / Courtesy of Bloodaxe Books
True translators take to their craft so intensely that they tend to hurtle toward invisibility, and in Britain, the land of the Anonymous Translator, nobody...
Poets attending the 2015 Festival Internacional de Poesía in Granada, Nicaragua. Photo: Arnulfo Agüero
In her spellbinding The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War (2002), Giocond...
Mohamed Nedali’s debut novel, Morceaux de choix: les amours d’un apprenti-boucher, was selected by Nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio as the winner of the Prix Grand Atlas in 2005. I recen...
I land in Los Angeles and meet up with Mandy Kahn and David Shook, who’ve just returned from a week in Seattle, armed with a box of poetry from AWP. After Mandy drops us off, David and I grab a quick...
André Naffis-Sahely and Breyten Breytenbach. Photo by Victor DlaminiPart 2 continues with highlights from the “Dancing in Other Words” festival; if you haven’t read part 1 and...
After being invited by Breyten Breytenbach to attend the “Dancing in Other Words” festival in Stellenbosch, South Africa, this past May, André Naffis-Sahely sent us the following travelogue. Part...