Political commentator, translator and poetry editor Eliot Weinberger discusses the extraordinary breadth of his work, including What I Heard About Iraq and his recent essay collection Oranges & Peanuts for Sale, which alone takes in Beckett, Paz, the colour blue, Shiva, Obama and Susan Sontag.

He's the James  Joyce of the Essay, and a lovely person to interview.

Here’s the audio if video isn’t your thing:

Ramona Koval: From the Melbourne Writers' Festival, American writer Eliot Weinberger, one of the most gifted, well read, wise and funny essayists writing in English today, and not only an essayist but a translator and literary critic too.

For the past 13 years also I've broadcast his fascinating and eccentric essays on Radio National, one about a rabbit whose teeth grew and grew, one about a dog that used to predict the future in ancient India, a prose poem about all the dreams that people have in the Icelandic sagas. His loves and hates and interests span the globe, and ideas from anthropology to history, to poetics, to politics.

His edited book of Borges's Selected Non-Fictions, published in 1999, won the American National Book Critics Circle Prize for Criticism. He's also the primary translator of Mexican poet Octavio Paz's work in English. He was also the first American to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.

But perhaps his best known work was an essay called 'What I Heard About Iraq'. It's a collage of the statements made by American administration officials and their allies leading up to the war, and then after the war began of these same officials as well as American soldiers and Iraqi citizens. It's a kind of history of the Iraq war in soundbites from 1992 to January 2005, and after its publication in the London Review of Books it was the most visited article ever on the magazine's website. It was reproduced or linked on some 100,000 other websites. It's been translated into many languages and a sequel, called 'What I Heard About Iraq in 2005', is reproduced in Eliot Weinberger's most recent collection of essays Oranges and Peanuts for Sale.

So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Eliot Weinberger at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Eliot Weinberger: Now, I have to praise you because last night I went to the Jonathan Franzen speech, and like everybody else I have read 1,000 things about The Corrections but I don't really read American realist fiction, and so I've never had any desire to read it, but then after your introduction I thought, gee, maybe I really should read that. So I want to tell you that you are the embodiment of infectious enthusiasm.

Ramona Koval: Well, thank you very, very much, because you are the embodiment of infectious curiosity. You are completely curious, it seems to me, about all kinds of things, and your curiosity takes you and takes us as your readers to the most marvellous places. Today I want to talk about all the different things you do and the different things you write and the different approaches you take and to find out what makes you so curious, what makes you you. But before we do that, I want to ask about a rumour that I heard that you've been investigated by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Eliot Weinberger: That is true. You didn't know that I am a human rights abuser. It's kind of a long story, and I can't really tell you the details because I'm afraid it's going to start the whole process over. But I was indeed investigated by the Australian Human Rights Commission. And it's because I wrote an essay about a tiny religious minority in the Middle East, and this is a minority that has existed for at least 2,000 years, and they have a very beautiful mythology and a lot of strange beliefs. For example, they have a God who is half-man and half-book and he sits in eternity reading himself.

And this group has also in their traditional writings said a lot of unkind things about the three great monotheisms of the Mid-East; Islam, Christianity and Judaism, which probably is not shared by contemporary practitioners but it is in their traditional writings. So in my essay I talk about all of these things, and it was published in Harper's magazine. And there was a coda in Harper's saying that these people have also been subject to tremendous persecution since the rise of various Jihadi groups in the Middle East.

Anyway, a member of that religious group in Australia took great offence at the article and lodged an official complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission for racial vilification. And the way it works is there are three stages. The first stage is the determination. They have to decide whether or not this is a case that should be investigated. The second stage is reconciliation where they try to bring the two groups together. And if that fails, the third stage is one can be subject to federal prosecution in Canberra. And I knew of course that I wouldn't get to the third stage because, as we well know, the United States does not extradite for human rights violations, otherwise Washington would be half empty.

So the first stage, determination, they sent me 40 pages of documents of things that I had to fill out, you know, who am I and so forth, and then what is the nature of this magazine Harper's? Is it an Aryan Nation magazine, and so forth and so on. And they kept trying to tell them that this is a case where the guy should write a letter to the editor and they will undoubtedly publish it. But they determined that the case should go forward to reconciliation.

Ramona Koval: Can I ask, what was the element of the essay that was so offensive?

Eliot Weinberger: I think it was because I mentioned some of the unkind things that they had to say about the other monotheisms.

Ramona Koval: And knowing you, you would have chapter and verse.

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, it's thoroughly documented, and the people today probably don't think those things, they certainly don't think them publicly. So I think this is what offended this person. So then it went to the reconciliation stage, and actually Harper's had to hire lawyers because they were afraid that Harper's magazine could get banned in Australia if it was found to be a magazine promoting racial vilification.

So then the second half of the story is even more unbelievable. So this is where your tax dollars have been going lately! The second half of the story is even more unbelievable because I'm sitting in a cafe, I live in New York City in Greenwich Village, and I'm sitting in a cafe in Greenwich Village with a friend of mine and I'm telling him the story of what's going on in Australia.

And there is a man sitting next to me alone at a table next to me and he says, 'Excuse me, but I should tell you that I am a special prosecutor in Canberra and I specialise in the various ethnic minorities, and I have worked very closely with...' and he named the actual name of the Australian branch of this religious minority, which I had not mentioned. And he said, 'And so, if your case does come to trial I will probably be the prosecutor, and I don't think you should be talking about this in front of me.' Oh my God, you know, it's like the Australian CIA is after me.

Ramona Koval: Who moves tables, him or you?

Eliot Weinberger: So then I tried to...but he was a humourless lawyer type, and I tried to tell him the story, and he said, 'I'm sorry, I cannot be talking about this.' And it turned out he was on holiday in New York for a couple of weeks and just happened to be sitting there. Just amazing. So ultimately the case was decided that the guy would write a letter to Harper's, which they indeed published, and that was the end of it, so I don't have to stand trial in the Hague or anything like that.

Ramona Koval: I was going to be admiring about your bravery about coming to the Melbourne Writers Festival under such circumstances.

Eliot Weinberger: I think I'm safe.

Ramona Koval: I mentioned that you would know the facts and you would have chapter and verse, and this is because...are often said to you over the years about your essay, now come on, this can't be true, this must be a hallucination of yours. But this is not what you do...

Eliot Weinberger: I never hallucinate.

Ramona Koval: Tell me about you and the facts, just the facts.

Eliot Weinberger: I think it's because I basically have no imagination. The one rule of thumb that I have for my essays is I don't make anything up. So everything is independently verifiable somewhere and/or they are the things that somebody has believed to be true. And so I start from that premise in terms of writing an essay, and then after that in terms of the form of the essay then it just takes off from there. Because the essay, it seems to me, is very stuck in 18th-century models in English, and it has never really had an avant-garde in English. So because of that it's kind of unexplored territory, and so you can basically do anything you want with the essay except that very few people are doing it.

Ramona Koval: In other languages has there been an avant-garde?

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, in other languages there's more of an avant-garde in terms of the essay, and you are free to do things, even in the newspapers and so forth. In other languages poets and fiction writers have regular columns in newspapers and things, and there's much more of a freedom in terms of what you can do.

Ramona Koval: So were you shocked, surprised, gratified at the reception of your 'What I Heard Happened'?

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, I was amazed.

Ramona Koval: How did it start?

Eliot Weinberger: It started it because it at the time...it's hard to recuperate what was happening at the time, but at the time, at least in the United States, the media was quite similar to being in the Soviet Union in that you basically only heard what the government wanted you to hear. And to get opposition opinions or even information, one had to rely entirely on the internet and reading the foreign press and so forth, and I can't really imagine the Bush years without the internet in terms of that. And it seemed that there had been this kind of collective amnesia about how we had gotten into the war in Iraq. So I just kind of put together this collages of, as you said, soundbites, all of it verifiable, of the kind of language and the things that were said about weapons of mass destruction and so on leading up into the war, and then the actual war itself.

And at the time my political articles were written for magazines and newspapers abroad, and in English what I did was I sent them as emails to friends, and it's a wonderful way to publish actually for that kind of thing because the reader votes with his or her 'Forward' button. So if they like it they send it on. So these things took on a life of their own on the internet. So it actually went out on the internet and then the London Review of Books picked it up, and then it just kind of took off in that sense. And then a guy in Los Angeles turned it into a play, and the play ran for eight months and then toured England. Then people did dance performances of it and art installations, it just went on.

And then the sequel, 'What I Heard about Iraq in 2005', someone wrote a radio play here for the ABC and I think it won some prize here too, and that actually was a very moving performance because they did it in all different voices, including a bunch of children who happened to be touring the ABC studio at the time they were recording it. So then you hear some 10-year-old speaking the words of Donald Rumsfeld, and it's truly creepy.

I think the success of it was really because there was nothing else. It's not that it was so great. It's curious that the Iraq war, unlike the Vietnam War, really produced no poetry, it didn't produce any really memorable songs. There's basically nothing came out of it that fired the popular imagination, quite the opposite of Vietnam.

Ramona Koval: And its chime I suppose begins 'I heard that', 'I heard that this happened', 'I heard that that happened', and it seems that you were taking what you know about poetry and applying it to a big prose piece like that.

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, and that essay has...there is no overt opinion. Obviously there are opinions that are expressed in it, but there's nothing that I'm actually commenting on anything. It all sticks to the facts and the actual quotes. But it is true that I try to write essays the way one writes poetry in that I'm listening to the sentences and I'm more concerned with those kinds of musical things, and also making the kind of leaps that you can make in poetry without necessarily filling in all the gaps the way one often does in prose.

Ramona Koval: I think that we'd all like to see what's in this little yellow folder here that Eliot Weinberger has in front of him...

Eliot Weinberger: It's a complete dossier on you, Ramona, actually!

Ramona Koval: Because I know that there are some unpublished pieces there, and we like to hear Eliot to read something to us. A lot of you may not have read some of the other of Eliot Weinberger's work which has not much to do with Barack or Rumsfeld or George W Bush, and I think it would be lovely to hear some of the new stuff.

Eliot Weinberger: Okay. So just lately I've been writing some essays that are less than one page long, so I thought I would read three of them, they are super-short. All three of these are about India. India is a place where I try to spend a lot of time. They don't have any titles, and that's it.

[reading from Each year in the village of... to ...and stop the shaking.]

Actually when I was 13 I discovered this poem by Octavio Paz called 'Sun Stone' and that was the proverbial book that made me want to become a writer. So in high school I was translating Latin American poetry, Spanish poetry, to learn how to write poetry. And I was translating a lot of Paz but also other obvious people like Neruda, Lorca, Vallejo. And then when I was 18 I met somebody who knew Paz. So I've got all these translations sitting in my drawer, and this guy sent them to Paz who was then the Mexican Ambassador in India, and he liked it a lot and he asked me to translate this book of his early prose poetry called Eagle or Sun?.

So I had gone to college for about a year and then I dropped out and I was a hippie and I wasn't doing anything, and so then I could tell my parents I had something to do, I was translating this book. So that's how my relation with Paz started, and then it lasted 30 years until his death.

Ramona Koval: And what about when he saw you for the first time?

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, he was a little shocked. My hair is much longer than yours, and I had beads and all that sort of stuff. But the interesting thing about Octavio was he was a great believer in youth. For example, the magazines he edited in Mexico, even quite late in his life, unlike certain magazines that are edited by older people where most of the contributors are quite elderly, not naming any names, he always had lots of young writers writing for it, and he really believed in that. So I think he was a little shocked when I showed up on his doorstep, but I think he liked that.

Ramona Koval: What didn't you like about university? I mean, you're the autodidact's autodidact, aren't you?

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, I just had an authority problem.

Ramona Koval: Weren't they going fast enough for you?

Eliot Weinberger: No, I don't think it was that. We're talking about the '60s and I was a hippie and actually I was at...the university that I attended for less than a year was Yale which was then still a boys' school. Most of the people, they were like George Bush, who was actually there then, and it was interesting because everybody you met was a brand name, it was like, 'Hi, I'm Bob Colgate,' 'I'm Ed Schick,' it was like opening up your medicine cabinet. So there is about five hippies there, it was just terrible. It's a different school now, especially since they have let women in and so forth, and also about at least half the school where these really dumb guys from prominent families, which is not quite as true anymore, it's probably now maybe 20% like that, but there really were a lot of those George Bush types, you know, so I just couldn't take it.

Ramona Koval: I have just written 'decision points' down here because you wrote this absolutely vicious review of George W Bush's...was it memoir? It was something with his name on it...

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, it's supposed to be his memoir. And the interesting thing about when they reviewed these political memoirs is they assume this fiction that the person wrote it, and so 'Bush points out this' and so forth and they even talk about the prose style sometimes. Obviously Bush did not write a word of this book, so I got rid of that fiction and then I talk about the Bush team, the people who are behind writing this thing. And then I go from there into a thing about Foucault and the death of the author and how this is the most post-modern text because it's a text completely without an author, it's been completely created by these unknown people.

Ramona Koval: But I hadn't realised until you started talking about Yale when you were a student there how familiar you would be with this whole frat boy background.

Eliot Weinberger: Well, not exactly. No, I can't say I was very familiar...I wasn't really hanging with these people, you know...

Ramona Koval: But you were observing them very closely.

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, they were around. But I think Bush was extreme because he was actually in a fraternity...they didn't really have fraternities then but they had a very small number of fraternities which he was in, and he was a branding the posteriors of the pledgers, he was branding them with a hot coathanger and things like that. He was a fairly extreme person.

Ramona Koval: But did you have fun writing the review?

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, I had fun. The London Review asked me to do it and I wasn't really going to do it because it meant that I had to read the book, and I actually did read every word of it too, but then there was this scene that was revealed in the book and then I said I've got to write this review, and that scene is when Bush is 14 or something and his mother has a miscarriage at home and Bush drives her to the hospital...I guess he's 16...he drives her to the hospital and she has preserved the foetus in a jar and she shows Bush the foetus, the miscarried foetus of his sister in this jar, and I thought my God, this is something I have to write about. It's just beyond belief. The Bush family drama is really something that is...

Ramona Koval: Sort of the Addams Family.

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, it's just beyond anything.

Ramona Koval: Tell me about why you try and spend a lot of time in India.

Eliot Weinberger: I don't know, it's one of my homelands there.

Ramona Koval: Why is it one of your homelands?

Eliot Weinberger: I don't know, it's just you get addicted to it. I've probably spent about three years of my life there on various trips, and travelling in many different parts. But I don't go to an ashram or anything like that.

Ramona Koval: But these essays there, do they come from places that you've been or newspapers or..?

Eliot Weinberger: Well, I've been in Tamil Nadu a lot of course but I haven't been in the extreme north-east which is where two of those tribes...not the village where they married the girl to the frog but the other ones, yes.

Ramona Koval: And how did you get the story about the village where they marry the girls to the frog?

Eliot Weinberger: I got that from the Indian press, yes.

Ramona Koval: What about China and you, because that's another place that you've been a lot in your imagination at least.

Eliot Weinberger: I have now been in China. But I'm very close friends with Bei Dao who has been in exile since '89, except that just two weeks ago they allowed him into China for the first time since '89. And so I always vowed that I wasn't going to go to China until Bei Dao could go. Then about four years ago I was invited to a poetry Festival in Chengdu in Sichuan province, and I called up Bei Dao and I said, 'I have been invited to this poetry festival, what do you think?' And he said, 'Well, if you wait for me you'll be too old to enjoy it, so why don't you just go?'

So I went and then of course when I arrived in Chungdu it turned out that the police had cancelled the festival. But we were all there anyway, so it was terrific. So I have now been a couple of times. And I also went a few years later because there is a Chinese billionaire poet, and in fact I have now met two Chinese billionaire poets.

Ramona Koval: Gee, they must love poetry in China.

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, it's fantastic. So obviously they didn't make their billions from poetry. He likes to invite a lot of people on these trips, so he invited a bunch of writers on a trip in Sichuan in the far west of China on the border of Kyrgyzstan, to go on this journey, it was quite extraordinary because since this guy is a billionaire all of these generals and governors and things were definitely extremely obsequious to him. And so every time we got off the bus there would be lines of girls in native costumes all applauding and policemen standing at attention and so forth. And then at one place we were met by the governor of this province who greeted us at the border and then escorted us to be Governor's mansion where a banquet was ready for us. And in our honour a horse had been slaughtered, and then we as the distinguished guests were supposed to eat the choicest morsels of the horse, which were its intestines and stomach.

Ramona Koval: Did you?

Eliot Weinberger: Yes. So it was that kind of thing. And then the funniest thing that happened to me on that trip was one day we were at breakfast and they said, well, 'After breakfast we're going to this meeting and we'd like you to give a short speech.' I said, 'Really, what's the speech about?' And they said, 'Well, just talk about how glad you are to be here.' So I said okay, fine.

So we drive into this town and it turns out that this town was celebrating its anniversary, and there were 40,000 people gathered there in the square, all wearing different coloured baseball caps and organised by their baseball caps, so red and yellow, blue baseball caps. And they put me on the dais with all of these generals, and then I had to address the masses. So, you know, 'Comrades...' But my speech was quite successful, I praised the local melons.

Ramona Koval: Of course you did. Well, Bei Dao, one of the Misty Poets, I remember...

Eliot Weinberger: Yes, obscure poets.

Ramona Koval: Obscure poets. And you write about Gu Cheng in this book, another of the Misty Poets or the obscure poets. But I notice that you've published this piece over the objections of the Gu Cheng estate. What was that about? Why do you get yourself into so much trouble wherever you go?

Eliot Weinberger: This is really turning into a therapy session. 'Why did you drop out of college, and why are you always in trouble?' Thanks Mom!

Ramona Koval: Why do you think I look like your mother?

Eliot Weinberger: Gu Cheng was an incredible...he's probably the most radical poet in the history of China. And he was a poet in the '70s and '80s, and he was an extremely eccentric person. For example, he always wore this hat that was made out of the pant leg of some blue jeans, and he had this conical hat like that. And he was married to a beautiful woman named Xie Ye, and the one time I met him was they had a tour of Chinese poets in the US and we went to Chinatown in New York and to a restaurant, and the first thing was that Gu Cheng picked up the menu and he ordered something from the menu. And his wife was completely shocked because she said Gu Cheng never orders in a restaurant, he only eats what's served to him. And then she put a tape recorder on the table and said, 'Everything Gu Cheng says must be recorded.' So this entire conversation was recorded. And the whole time his wife is staring at him with total adoration, she never even looked at me, she was just looking at Gu Cheng.

Then at one point Gu Cheng gets up to go to the bathroom, and when he's not there his wife, who I had just met, turns to me and says, 'I hope he dies.' And it turned out that they had had this child who she had to...they were living in New Zealand on an island off of New Zealand and they were subsisting on nuts and berries that they gathered. Gu Cheng insisted that he should be the only person, and so they had had a child and she was forced to give it to a Maori family to raise. She said, 'I want my child back. I hope he dies.' And then the story ends just horribly because about a year after that Gu Cheng killed her with an axe and then hung himself. So it's an unbelievable story.

There's a wonderful translation of Gu Cheng's poetry in English, and they wanted me to write the introduction for the book, which I did. But then the Gu Cheng family refuses to accept the fact that he murdered his wife, which of course I say in the introduction. And so they would not allow it to be published as the introduction to the book. So it became a separate article.

Ramona Koval: Anyone who hears that story can see why you are attracted to it. But what are the elements of the stories that find their way into your work? I'm just trying to understand why they are so fantastic and how you put them together; a wonderful poet, a tragic story, a kind of madness. All of these things weave themselves through your work.

Eliot Weinberger: Yes. I don't know, I'm incapable of writing fiction.

Ramona Koval: Does there have to be something cracked that attracts you? There's something about the stories that just has a twist or...

Eliot Weinberger: Right, I can't write fiction, I've never been able to write fiction, and so I'm just attracted to those kind of stories. One of the traditional uses of literature is talking about strange stories, which is why...sometimes I get accused of cultural imperialism, especially by university students who have been studying cultural studies and all that kind of thing. And I always say, well, what am I supposed to do? Just write about middle-aged nerds in New York City, just myself? Literature begins with strange stories and visits to other lands, which is one of the reasons why I've never been interested in reading American realist fiction, going back to what we said at the beginning, because I don't want to read about divorce in the suburbs, I can make a phone call and hear about that.

Ramona Koval: Isn't he fantastic? Please, thank him.

Eliot Weinberger speaking with me at the Melbourne Writers Festival. His latest collection of essays is called Oranges and Peanuts for Sale, it is published by New Directions.