Home / Quotes / Quote by Elliott Colla

Quote by Elliott Colla

“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.”

Quote by Elliott Colla

Author

Limited information is available about Elliott Colla, whose profession and category are unknown. His life experience and contributions are not detailed. more

You May Also Like

“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.”

Reality Moving Complicated Familiar Decent Neighborhood

Author:Elliott Colla

“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.”

Reality Zone Electricity

Author:Elliott Colla

“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 Fall Discipline

Author:Elliott Colla

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

Author:Elliott Colla

“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.”

Thinking Art Book Style

Author:Elliott Colla

“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.”

Thinking Moving Successful Strange Familiar Chinese Translations

Author:Elliott Colla

“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.”

Thinking Different Language Study Style Relation Familiar Classic Translations Modernism Joyce Ulysses Estrangement

Author:Elliott Colla

“Every Native North American text I've ever grappled with has taught me something important about how to live on the continent where I was born.”

Important Native

Author:Robert Bringhurst

“Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.”

Literature Russian Literature

Author:Robert Bringhurst

“I'm curious and you know, I really think cinema is strong medium that allows you to go to so many different mental countries, not just geographical countries. As far as it allows me to express something of my own truth, it's fine for me. I can go to the moon.”

Thinking Different Country Strong Moon Curious

Author:Isabelle Huppert