Keynote
Award-winning American poet Marilyn Hacker offers the brilliance of Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata in an exquisite translation.
Book Title
She Says
Subtitle
Bilingual Edition
Cover Image
- “By freeing both Arabic and French from their modest definitions, Khoury-Ghata effectively and convincingly leaves the language she ‘lives in’ for the one that now lives in her.”—Pleiades
Body
She says
the earth is so vast one can't help but be lost like water from a broken jug/
There is no fortress against the wind
the winter wanderer must count on the compassion of walls
—from "She Says"
Translated by celebrated American poet Marilyn Hacker, Vénus Khoury-Ghata's She Says explores the mythic and confessional intersection of the French and Arabic imaginations with poems that open like "a suitcase filled with alphabets." Sex, barrenness, grief, and death are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent by lines often jagged and spare, their music unhaltered. Khoury-Ghata is a vital voice in both her native and adopted languages and we are pleased to present this important collection in English.
the earth is so vast one can't help but be lost like water from a broken jug/
There is no fortress against the wind
the winter wanderer must count on the compassion of walls
—from "She Says"
Translated by celebrated American poet Marilyn Hacker, Vénus Khoury-Ghata's She Says explores the mythic and confessional intersection of the French and Arabic imaginations with poems that open like "a suitcase filled with alphabets." Sex, barrenness, grief, and death are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent by lines often jagged and spare, their music unhaltered. Khoury-Ghata is a vital voice in both her native and adopted languages and we are pleased to present this important collection in English.
List Price
$15.00
Purchase at
Purchase at:
About the Author
Credit: Anne Selders
Credit: Margaretta K. Mitchell
Praise
- “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
