Reviews of She Says

2003 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

“Hacker opens for English-language readers a veritable ‘suitcase filled with alphabets’—the perfectly blended French and Arabic imagination of Lebanese native and French emigrée writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata, who evokes in sinuous lines and multivalent imagery the richness of her experiences of a multi-ethnic traditional culture.” —Women’s Review of Books

“What is startling…is the even quality and tone throughout She Says. Translator Marilyn Hacker deserves a lot of credit for that, and for making sure that Khoury-Ghata’s images are consistently polished and evocative.” —Christian Science Monitor

“All readers interested in poetics as poetics (that is to say inner rhymes, rhythm, imagery, etcetera) will rejoice in reading this staggeringly wonderful achievement. Above all, it should certainly appear on university bookshelves as proof that real poetry at its highest levels can still exist and can still work, despite all the unimaginative and dull prosaic pretenses at poetry that appear in so many of our literary magazines today.” —World Literature Today

“Marilyn Hacker deftly takes the original French verses and provides poems thick with images and lines that melt on the tongue.” —Altar Magazine

“A writer with literary prowess in Arabic and French, Ms. Khoury-Ghata’s work is almost astral in its inventions of metaphors and mythologies….Ms. Khoury-Ghata’s graceful French is rendered into the impressively skillful, thoughtful English one expects from Ms. Hacker.” —American Poet

“Amazing images, amazing lines; that pity brings, that pain produces. I have huge admiration for these poems—and these translations. Marilyn Hacker is doing a great service making them available to an American readership.” —Gerald Stern

“Vénus Khoury-Ghata plants a new language with the seeds of an ancient one. The poetry of She Says cannot be contained by the old worlds of words yet there she is in a household of wind and rain or within the realm of trees. Who better to translate this mythic sweep of poetry than Marilyn Hacker whose own poetry is a breaking through.” —Joy Harjo

“Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s poems are striking for their combined innocence and wisdom. In Marilyn Hacker’s pristine translations, the poems are dreamlike and real, mysterious and utterly true. Here Khoury-Ghata envisions the beginnings of the world and modern tragedy simultaneously and with a heightened clarity. Language shines in a new light as she searches for its origin: ‘How to find the name of the fisherman who hooked the first word / of the woman who warmed it in her armpit / or of the one who mistook it for a pebble and threw it at a stray dog.’ And she takes us to a time when ‘Everything that frequented water had a soul / clay jug, gourd, basin ‘buckets fished out the ones stagnating in the wells’ indifference.’ I am enchanted.” —Grace Schulman