Here There Was Once a Country
- Book Review,
by Venus Khoury-Ghata
Ploughshares, spring 2001
A searing translation .... Hacker luminously brings to life Khoury-Ghata's intimate, mysterious, and unique voice.
Book Description
Lebanese writer Venus Khoury-Ghata, who lives in France and has won many of France's major literary prizes, blends French surrealism with Arabic poetry's communal narrative mode in three stunning poetic sequences, presented here in distinguished translations by Marilyn Hacker.
From the Publisher
Khoury-Ghata's work, Marilyn Hacker notes, "bridges the anti-lyrical surrealist tradition which has informed modern French poetry since Baudelaire and the parabolic, communal narrative with its (we might say Homeric) repetitions of metaphors and semi-mythic tropes of Arabic poetry. Her poems have as implicit backdrop the language and landscape of her mother country." "From the embers of loss and death, from childhood and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests, geography and God, Venus Khoury-Ghata has created a dazzling, soaring, thrilling imagination. Brilliantly translated by Marilyn Hacker, HERE THERE WAS ONCE A COUNTRY is to poetry what ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is to fiction. Here is another world, another language, another dimension to reality, which will never again be the same." --Alicia Ostriker "Venus Khoury-Ghata is an extraordinary poet; Marilyn Hacker is an extraordinary poet and translator. When these artists meet, we have a book which is a rare gift to the reader. Don't miss it." --Carolyn Kizer "We already know Marilyn Hacker as one of the poets by whom our generation will be remembered, and as a brilliant translator. Here she introduces us to a voice completely other, an imagination with the power to make us gasp." --Marilyn Nelson
From the Author
"Nourished by two languages, I write in Arabic through the French language--when my poems are translated into Arabic, they seem to be returning to the original language. For years, my first drafts were written in both languages, the Arabic going from right to left on the page and the French from left to right: they crossed each other's paths in the middle. Twenty-eight years in Paris haven't cured me of my mother tongue."
About the Author
Venus Khoury-Ghata is a Lebanese poet and novelist, resident in France since 1973. She has published many collections of poems and novels, including ANTHOLOGIE PERSONNELLE, new and selected poems (1997), and ELLE DIT, her most recent collection (1999). Her awards include the Prix Mallarme, the Prix Apollinaire, and the Grand Prix de la Societe des gens de lettres. Her work has been translated into Italian, Russian, Dutch, German, and Arabic. Marilyn Hacker is the author of nine books of poetry, including the verse novel LOVE, DEATH AND THE CHANGING OF THE SEASONS and her most recent collection, SQUARES AND COURTYARDS (2000). Her awards include the National Book Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the Lenore Marshall Award. She lives in New York and Paris, and directs the M.A. program in English literature and creative writing at the City College of New York.
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