My thanks to Michael Schmidt for commissioning this collection and to the MacDowell Colony, where I worked on many of these translations. Thanks are also due to the editors of the following publications where some of these translations originally appeared: Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, Inventory, and Transition, among others. The Manhattan Review nominated ‘Life’ for a 2015 Pushcart Prize, while Asymptote nominated ‘Letter to My Friends Overseas’ for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. I owe Sarah Maguire of the Poetry Translation Centre a great debt for first affording me the opportunity to translate Mr Laâbi’s work in 2011 when I led a number of workshops on his poetry. The results of those efforts were later collected in the pamphlet Poems, which the PTC published in March 2013. Some of those poems were also reprinted in the PTC’s anthology My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre (Bloodaxe, 2014). Christopher Schaefer’s interview with Mr Laâbi first appeared in The Quarterly Conversation. Thanks also to English PEN for their support through a ‘PEN Translates!’ grant in relation to this book. Finally, I am very grateful to both Christopher Schaefer and Jim Moore for their enthusiastic support throughout the process, as well as for their highly valuable contributions.
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